GARY WOODS is a photographer, filmmaker and artist.
His photographs are held in many permanent collections including The Getty Museum, the Kawasaki City Museum and the Biblioteque Nationale.
In 2000 he was a BBC Artist in Residence , recent exhibitions have been at The British Council in Abuja, Nigeria and the New Photographers Gallery Vancouver
"My first exhibitions were mostly of pictures of small figures set in large landscapes or trompe l'oeil figures of shadows taken from a great hight. My father pointed out to me years later that, as a child, we had lived near a beach with an extensive sandbar. I had been allowed hundreds of yards into the water and still it only reached my waist. Looking back to see my minders from such a distance was a great liberation. 'The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms the second '. As an infant my sight had been affected by infections causing scotoma. I trace my love of darkness, scotophilia, to that period.""Often the results of the time spent in the darkroom following images are purely casual. I achieve different results by trial and error, seeing new images even after developing the negatives. My use of photochemistry is not conventional and the tactile manipulation of prints may involve non-photographic materials. I think of negatives as ghosts, printing them lays them to rest .The advent of digital suggests new possibilities. A detail from a photograph may be an excuse to 'paint' and/or extend an image. Of course such approaches are not new, Gustave le Grey and many 19thC photographers often used more than one negative printing an image.
I am interested in how one constructs ones perception of reality through the senses. As an accultured sense, sight is learned through these battles of infancy and childhood. My grandfather managed a local cinema and I often fell asleep watching narrative films. Later when we moved to London, I saw some early films by Antonioni and was enthused sufficiently to apply to Film School. What was it that so excited me about a film where almost nothing happened? In a sense it is what intrigues me now about some photographs. It is often the absence of a single, controlled meaning and rather the surfeit of possible meanings. 'Some photographs can seduce us by inviting us to create a meaning or a narrative for them. '