All Zones Off Peak

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Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak is the collection of a fifteen year photographic journey around Liverpool. The book features pictures resulting from spending eighteen years riding the buses of Liverpool during his 1978 to 1996 ‘bus odyssey’, the images were selected from 100,000 negatives. These works form a portrait of Liverpool and its people taken from the various bus routes that criss-cross the city. Wood spent 20 years travelling the buses during off-peak hours. In this time he shot 3,000 rolls of film, painstakingly refining his view of the city. The work has been published in two books: All Zones Off Peak (1998) and Bus Odyssey (2001). Described as ‘an epic of the everyday’, the photographs are dramatic and powerful documents of a city in motion. The book is composed of images where Wood photographs the world beyond the window as well as fellow travelers on the bus and waiting outside.

This image is taken from Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak, at first glance the images read like studies of the disenfranchised of the Northern inner cities. Wood’s bus journeys visually connect the regenerated areas of the city with more neglected, peripheral spaces: the declining high streets, areas of wasteland, cleared slums and abandoned houses of the inner-ring suburbs. These photographs are not about capturing specific moments but the endlessly repeated routines and minimal, wordless communities produced by bus journeys.

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For the layout of ‘All zones off peak’ Wood uses a classic format for most the pages, using the same template of landscape pictures with a white border on all four sides, none of the images seem to be cropped and if they have been they have been cropped into the same landscape proportions as all the other images.