Steidlville

Bill Wood’s business was photography–and he produced tens of thousands of images over the course of his career. A tall, slender, hardworking family man with a penchant for bow ties, Wood (1913-1979) was born, lived, and died in the Fort Worth, Texas, area, and his photography played a central role in how his clients chose to see and to portray themselves and their city. Bill Wood’s Business features approximately 300 of Wood’s photographs, and essays by Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman that pay respect to the skills Wood (and professional photographers like him) brought to the business of photography.

The extraordinary range of Bill Wood’s images, and a shared appreciation of archives and the construction of photographic realities are what drew Diane Keaton and Marvin Heiferman to this project. In an earlier collaboration, Still Life (1982), they explored the surreality, fantasies, and economic motivations percolating below the surface of the glamorous color publicity photographs Hollywood studios orchestrated, produced, and distributed in the mid-20th century. Since then, Keaton – in her film and book projects – and Heiferman – in his curatorial, writing, and publishing work – have continued to explore the quirks of American culture, icons, and images. Keaton purchased the archive of Wood’s negatives twenty years ago, and in Bill Wood’s Business, she and Heiferman team up again to look at and through photographs, to see what they are expected to depict and what they actually reveal.