John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning - Tapa dura

Historically, purity is not a term that has often been applied to the work of John Wood. In photo-historical terms, Wood is thought of as one of those renegades who went against pure photography by incorporating drawing, painting, collage, and every other technique he could get his hands on (not to mention explicit political content), into his practice, thus ushering in the multi-media of the 1960s that caused a crisis in straight photography. Long before it became the signal medium of the avant-garde, collage was a folk art, practiced by children, lovers, and grand-mothers. I suspect this is one of the reasons John Wood was initially attracted to it, just as he would later make art out of whirligigs. Or photography, for that matter, that art before and after art. From the jaundiced perspective of our pluralistic present, those once furiously enforced and ferociously defended divisions seem quaint. Now that those and most other boundaries have dissolved and digital imaging has normalized impurity and made the combination and alteration of different kinds of images commonplace, perhaps its a good time to reconsider the lifes work of John Wood. From the introduction by David Levi Strauss