Tom Wood took this photograph at Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, Ireland, in 2003. It is said that Saint Patrick spent 40 days fasting at the top of the mountain. For centuries, pilgrims have climbed it in search of succour; in recent years they have frequently been joined by documentary photographers, including Josef Koudelka, Martin Parr and Abbas.
County Mayo is Wood’s birthplace, and where he grew up. Though he has gone back to the west of Ireland every year since his family left for England in his adolescence, he had never climbed Croagh Patrick, thinking it too touristy. It was Chris Killip, his fellow photographer and friend, who persuaded him to do the walk against his better judgment; it was, he recalls, a bleak, drizzly afternoon and he’d a bad knee. “Anyway,” he told me last week, “I’m up there. And just for a few split seconds the light changed. So I made two pictures. And that was one of them.”
The woman in the waterproof coat takes her place in a remarkable book of Wood’s photographs of Ireland, taken over almost 50 years. The photographer’s mother, a Catholic, was forced away to England after she married his father, a Protestant, and, bitterly, subsequently only went back for funerals. On his own visits, Wood usually stayed on the old family farm, now run by his uncle and cousin. The pictures tell some of the story of that fractured family history in close-up – a slow making-sense of the landscape and religion and politics that formed him. When a cousin saw some of the photographs, he sent Wood a quote from the Psalms in response that read: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” Wood attached the quote to this picture, though he says he could just as easily have added it to several others.
• Irish Work by Tom Wood is published next month by RRB Photobooks (£75)
