Tom WoodLooking for Looking for Love(Signed and numbered)

Looking for Looking for Love is a reworking of one of the seminal photographic books of the 1980′s. Tom Wood’s photographs of the clientele of the Chelsea Reach Nightclub in New Brighton, Merseyside were taken between 1984-87 and first published as Looking For Love in 1989. Wood was a regular at the club and shot thousands of pictures over a number of years, however due to budget constraints at the time of printing only a fraction of these were reproduced as full plates in the original Cornerhouse publication. Wishing to honour the cooperation of his subjects and to communicate the scope of the work, the artist constructed a collage (subsequently stolen) to be printed as a double page spread in the opening pages of the book. This new monograph takes this collage as its starting point, the images that fill the pages of the book are faithful in shape, but not scale or sequence, to the artist’s original construction, scanned from Gareth McConnell’s personal copy of the book, the visible dot matrix and asymmetric shapes engenders the portraits with an energy and vibrancy that not only frees the images from the tyranny of the photographic rectangle but makes them almost bounce off the page. Looking for Looking for Love is a chance to revisit a series of photographs by one of the true underground heroes of British photography and catch a glimpse of British nightlife on the cusp of rave and the acid house phenomenon. Included are essays by Professor David Chandler, the author, artist and critic Neal Brown and the photographer and publisher Gareth McConnell.