Bus Odyssey

Good condition. Their faces lined and weary, their clothing altered by ever-changing fashions–the people who ride buses everyday are hardly the stuff of photographs. But the pictures Tom Wood has taken during 20 years of travel on Liverpool’s buses are much more than documents of mass transit in England. Rather, they transport viewers and riders alike on an odyssey in which the unspectacular becomes interesting. Seen only through the windows of a bus, the streets, buildings, parks, traffic, and pedestrians of Liverpool are recreated from a human and accessible perspective. The bus itself becomes a predominantly visual space, a metal box with vast areas of glass, a viewfinder that creates an inherent narrative as it moves though a city transformed into pictorial space.