It was around 2008 when I first became aware of the work of Tom Wood.I’d decided to walk down the aptly named Wood Street instead of Bold Street in Liverpool city center. I wandered into the old Open Eye Gallery and picked up a book called All Zones Off Peak. On the front was a photograph of an old blue and yellow Fareway bus. I was a frequent passenger on the F1, F2, and F9 routes during the early-to-mid-1990s, so I picked it up. A 15-year project of taking photos on buses around Merseyside. I knew these bus routes. I knew the clothes these passengers had on. I knew their hairstyles and the patterns on the seats. I even knew some of the people on the pages. I looked at the price. From memory, around £50. I decided not to buy it. A big regret, as copies now cost around £200.It was like a gateway drug, though. I started investigating all Tom’s other books and getting acquainted with other photographers, artists, and musicians who’d been inspired by him. A door had been opened, and I was game to walk through it. It led me to some of the most magic people—writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, dancers, DJs, designers, brickies, barbers, chefs, taxi drivers, accountants, journalists, electricians, therapists, counselors, drinkers, and thinkers—all of whom shared a love for what Tom Wood captured. I wondered if he knew how much his work was appreciated by all manner of weird and wonderful folk.Maybe I could tell him, as I’d just pulled up on a cosy street in a small town in North Wales, where Tom now resides with his wife, Lorna. I could see him on his doorstep, calling me over. Despite my preparation, I’d spent the hour-long drive flapping a bit. I wasn’t a journalist, nor had I ever interviewed anyone before. What if it was a disaster? Tom greeted me like an old friend. We spent ages going through his archives, drinking tea, listening to classical music, and partaking in a tremendous cheeseboard.VICE: Tom, you lived in and photographed my home city a lot. Tell me what that was like.Tom Wood: The thing about Liverpool, the thing that gets me most, was the humor. A lot of the time I was photographing, I was smiling. I can’t explain it. So I think a lot of the pictures, there’s a lot of humor in them, as well as being interesting as a picture.Because they can see you smiling behind the camera, do you think that affected how they allowed you to take the photograph?I’m not sure. I’m not going to analyze how I do it. I’d get on a bus, you know, I’d just start taking pictures. I couldn’t do that in [the center of] town at the time. I realized if I got on at the Pier Head [slightly out of the center, by the Mersey river], then it was my bus. And as people get on, I’m running around taking pictures in the cabin, no problem.So you were the first passenger on the bus?Yes, if I got on a packed bus in the city center and started taking pictures, people would say, “What’s he doing?” “Yeah, fuck off.” So I had different ways of doing it. I am shy, though. Which you’d think would make it difficult to photograph people.Yeah, you’d think so. In the beginning I did portraits. I would ask people’s permission. I’d be doing a project about families or whatever and I’d have to build up the courage and I’d get red in the face, and people could tell. Then I’d want a good picture, like all these old postcards I collected, where I’d be looking through thousands just to buy one. I want one that’s alive. I want one that’s that good, not just a standard one. So somehow, I’ve got to transmit that to the person. I’d be there with a camera on a tripod, and I’d see other stuff happening at the same time around me. ‘Oh, what’s that?’ And then think: How can I capture that? I had to learn to use a small camera, to try and capture stuff spontaneously. When I started doing that, it was a bit like when I told you earlier, that I was really good at table tennis?Yes, you did.In table tennis, I loved the constant movement. You’re going from here to there and back here, you’re looking that way and you’re hitting the ball the other way. When I photograph on the street, it’s a bit like that. You sense all the different elements, all the possibilities. The physicality of doing candid work, that’s part of the pleasure of it. And in the early days, taking pictures was kind of a way to hide behind the camera, like at a party. Later there was the bonus of providing me with a reason to move around the room, making eye contact, having brief conversations. I could enjoy myself socially and come back with pictures.Like a musician with a guitar. They’ve got a role to play while they’re holding this object.Yeah… It changes you. The physicality of taking pictures, and the sense of getting out of yourself. In terms of something being transmitted from me to you, even if you haven’t seen me, and I can sense something from you that allows me to take the picture. If I think you don’t want me to do it, I probably wouldn’t take it.Is it instinct?Well, I guess. Martin Parr told me I was too nice to be a photographer. I’d always send people pictures. They’d say, “What are you doing?” I’d explain. They’d say, “Can we have a copy?” You’d have to write the address, description, remember who they are, make a print in the darkroom, then six months later put it in an envelope. PLEASE DO NOT BEND!That’s commitment. I hope people appreciated that?They did. Then you see them two years later, you’re their friend for life. And their friends around them, they trust you. Over the years, that builds up. You photograph at a wedding, and there’s 200 people there, and half of them go to Great Homer Street Market: “Oh, that’s Tom who took Jackie’s wedding pictures.” So that facilitated the way I worked. Just making a connection with someone goes a long way. I’d go to Seacombe on the bus, go across on the ferry, photograph on the ferry. I’d photograph waiting for the bus to Great Homer Street Market, already had a warm up. I’m already in the flow. I make contact with people. Whereas if I went straight out of a car, I couldn’t make pictures. I’ve already started to get out of myself.Did you go to Greatie [Great Homer Street Market] every week for a long time?Fifteen years. In the afternoon I’d go to the pub, have something to eat, take a few pictures, then get the bus to the football and photograph people as they arrived at Goodison or Anfield, whichever team was at home. It was mostly men, high energy, sometimes aggressive, a different feel, but still often family, fathers, brothers, sons. That was my routine for a long time.The Chelsea Reach nightclub was also part of your routine, wasn’t it?It was. They were people I photographed regularly. Socially, I got to know people, and half of it was the whole fun, the banter. I wouldn’t have more than a couple of drinks. Did you ever feel in danger? Did you ever think, ‘I’d better get off?’No. But I’m not stupid. You move away from situations if necessary. I was mugged once coming away from there. That’s the only time. My feeling was always one of gratitude, they let me do it. At the same time, I always had to portray people in a fair light. Amazingly, the writer John Berger was a fan. He said something about the work being “just this side of politeness,” whatever that means. That’s a kind of poetic way of putting it. He wrote: “I wonder if you know the writings of Simone Weil. She understood the psychology of the soul (not just the conscious or subconscious) better than anyone else I have read.” He said my photographs run parallel to her paragraphs.What a quote. I love that. Were you curious about other people’s lives?I never thought about that really. Strangers trusted me though. There’s no doubt about that. I always smiled, maybe that helped me. There’s this thing about the sense of being stared at. I’m kind of embarrassed to say it, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. When I look at someone, or they look at me, or even if they don’t see me, something’s transmitted. There’s no way that we’re completely separate. I think there’s some kind of big consciousness we’re all part of, whether you call it the collective unconscious or all that kind of stuff. Maybe more specific than that. And there’s a tribal one as well. In Liverpool, people definitely have a shared consciousness. So yes, something happens for sure when you look at someone.Do you think photography preserves people, or does it remind us that we’re all disappearing?I know this great Czech photographer, Markéta Luskačová. She never liked the way photographers always talked about “shooting” pictures. She told me that in Czech “to photograph means to immortalize.” Which, actually, makes sense.At this point, we break to have a little mooch around the house. Tom shows me his speakers. Music and sound are an indulgence he allows himself. He listens while he works. It’s an impressive set up. We drink loose-leaf tea and talk Arthur Lee and Love. The salad we eat has been picked from the very garden I can see. Tom says he googled me once he learned I would be interviewing him. I don’t respond and just wait for him to say something. Eventually, he just says “Interesting.” We chat Bert Hardy and I tell Tom about his photos that were used on Shack’s Zilch album. I forget I’m interviewing him. Then I remember.Does music influence the way you take photographs?Music has always been there. In a darkroom there’s a lot of donkey work. Developing and printing films takes a long time. I play music all the time to keep me going.And for you that’s mostly classical?Every kind. My friend Steve used to give me cassettes, all kinds of music, Bo Diddley, every track a killer. Fletcher Henderson, 1920s jazz, Lee Perry 1970s bootlegs… We all need that friend who shows us new music.We do. I’d tape John Peel, Andy Kershaw. I’d play it in the darkroom. Classical came much later. I’d got into Janáček early on and a few other people, but it wasn’t serious. Then I got a record deck and had these classical records I’d bought from charity shops. I’d put them on. Suddenly I’m working and I’m hearing every note. At that point I started finding that classical music was stimulating other parts of my brain and influencing the visual side. It was making me take different choices, making me more optimistic, freeing me up somehow. There was this BBC program about Oliver Sacks, they were scanning people’s brains while they listened to different types of music. They’d play a piece—hardly any reaction. Then another—a little reaction. Then they played Jessye Norman, the opera singer, and the whole brain scan thing went red. They didn’t know that happened. The music activated the whole neural system. And this was 20 years ago. That’s what happens when I’m playing music, mainly abstract classical, pretty loud while I’m looking at pictures and it’s affecting me.There was that kid on Educating Yorkshire with the stutter. He couldn’t speak in front of the class. The teacher put headphones on him with classical music, and he read like he’d never had a stutter in his life.Really?All the kids were crying. I was crying. Now he does public speaking for a living.Well, I never thought I could understand classical music. I’m not educated. How could I understand it?Feel it.There you go. You don’t have to understand it. When I was at art school, conceptual art completely dominated the course. My girlfriend at the time spent two years writing about Marcel Duchamp. I made notes for this essay and scrawled across it: “BUT IT’S GOT TO BE REAL. R-E-A-L.” Underlined. I was a painter at the time. That’s always stayed with me. It’s the same with music. It’s got to be real, authentic.What did you see in Liverpool that you think Britain has forgotten?I don’t think about that. All I do is recognize it: This is the real thing. This is what I do. There are certainly other places in the UK I have no desire to photograph at all.Was Liverpool just because you lived there?Pure chance. I’ve always photographed where I live. Explain the difference between a documentary photograph and what you’re interested in.When I first met Martin Parr in 1980, he said: “I’m a documentary photographer. If I get a good picture, it’s a bonus.” I replied “Martin, I’m interested in good pictures, if it’s a document it’s a bonus.” A picture you can look at twice like a line of poetry. An awful lot of yourself has to come out when you’re making pictures of people. Something’s given from you to make those pictures. I want something really good. And above that, I want something I never knew I had. Something that surprises me. All the best pictures surprise. You talked about your writing process in one of your podcasts. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got nothing to say. You just sit down and start writing, and it happens once you start writing. Well, it’s the same here. Lisette Model once said “I’m not trying to prove anything in the pictures I take. The pictures I take prove something to me. I’m the one who gets the lesson.”Do you think it’s true that you can’t use up creativity? The more you do, the more you get.Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t come from you. It comes from… this wider thing. It’s the process. Richard Feynman, the physicist, said he would not understand the real physics of a system until he’d painstakingly isolated and calculated all the forces. I relate that to me going to Great Homer Street Market every Saturday for 15 years. Progress comes in science when experiments contradict theory. Physical intuition is a kind of feeling and seeing. Documenting is not enough. You must be personal about it. There are no shortcuts.A lot of what you’re talking about there is what I do in my day job, talking to men about recovery from addiction. There are no shortcuts. You have to be committed. You have to show consistency. You won’t enjoy a lot of it. But ultimately the process and the results are well worth it. Your recent book, Tom, And Love Comes in at the Eye…The title comes from a poem. “A Drinking Song” by W. B. Yeats: “Wine comes in at the mouth, and love comes in at the eye.”Great title.[Handing VICE a copy] A lot of the same people recur. Dave. Vernon. Jackie. They become older. You see them again. Vernon died, sadly. His son looks just like him. When [Wood’s previous book of photos from Chelsea Reach nightclub] Looking for Love came out and Vernon was on the cover, he was just pleased for me. He didn’t want any money or anything. Same as the guys at the market. There was another group of girls who came round the house because they’d seen themselves in the bookshop window. They assumed I was making money. I showed them my accounts!Everyone assumes, don’t they?They do. When I began shooting color in Britain, virtually no one was using it. I had an exhibition in 1980. The British Journal of Photography reviewed it and said it was “not the kind of thing to warm the heart of a photographic purist.” They called them “color snaps” blown-up huge. What I loved about the pictures I used to collect in family albums was the snap shot quality and the gaudiness and all that stuff in color.You captured it. [Pointing to a photograph in the book] The blue silky stuff there, those red chairs, that green stool…I liked that the Chelsea wasn’t like a lot of trendy clubs in Liverpool where people looked cool and knew they were cool and understood why you might be taking pictures. In the Chelsea, no one had a clue what I was doing. You got a whole mix of people. Older people as well. It was where people went for a late drink. A lot of pictures were done in another place, the Grand Hotel, which had a lot of mirrors. The mirrors gave an extra dimension. Pictures can work in so many ways. Some of these are from the contact sheets. Why bother doing proper scans? Sometimes the contact print looks better. Some were done on infrared, where I’d photograph and you wouldn’t see the flash. And infrared made the women look like angels. Sometimes a photograph looks like two or three pictures, a collage… There are lots of things going on. We mix formats too: medium format, 35mm, contact prints, screenshots, proper scans, selenium-toned prints, black and white, color… So you’re not going to be bored seeing the same kind of picture over and over again in this book. Nice pictures can be interesting pictures. They don’t have to be horrible.Much like life itself, Tom.Like life, yes.Tom Wood’s latest book, And Love Comes in at the Eye, is available to buy now from Photieman.PJ Smith—sometimes known as Roy—is a writer from North Liverpool. Follow him on Instagram @pj_smith9Follow Tom Wood Archive on Instagram @tomwoodarchiveThe post Drinking, Fighting, Falling in Love: Tom Wood’s Incredible Photos of Merseysiders in the 1980s appeared first on VICE.