At 79 years old, John Wood is having his first solo show at Celine, an art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. The intimate and erotic photographic portraits document the Glasgow leather scene. Wood, a self-taught photographer, was not a part of the leather subculture that he documented. He worked as a sound engineer for the BBC in the 1970s and then a telecommunications engineer for BT and took the photos during his off hours. “It’s funny because I’m not into leather at all. It’s just not my scene,” and explains that he was introduced to Glasgow’s leather scene by a former partner. “He had a gay life before me and he’d kept up with these people who were all part of this leather crowd…they kept nagging me to photograph them, so I thought: ‘Why not?’”
The portraits in the exhibit were taken between 1982 and 2002 and have been compared to Robert Mapplethorpe. Hopefully his work (and story) will get the attention it deserves after this exhibit closes in Glasgow.
