[2] Wood enrolled at Cleveland College in 1939, where he continued his interest in writing as assistant editor of Sky Line, the school's literary magazine.
They had their first child, Denis, in 1945 and the family traveled to Mexico while Wood worked on his first novel, and entranced by the indigenous tribes in the small villages surrounding Acapulco, Cuernavaca and San Cristóbal de las Casas, he took his first photos.
[8] The next year Wood purchased a 35 mm Contax II rangefinder camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Ohio's Amish country.
[12] In the meantime Wood began writing reviews of local jazz musicians for the Cleveland Press and Downbeat Magazine, and made a regular income as an advertising agent.
Curator Edward Steichen chose Wood's photograph of a pensive barefoot Mexican girl hurrying with her empty basket past a wooden door for the 1955 world-touring the Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors.
Also that year, the Akron Art Museum held a joint show by Jasper Wood and friend Harry Schulke who were each asked to invite 13 photographers to exhibit work alongside theirs.
When his friend Nico Jacobellis was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 for showing Louis Malle’s The Lovers at the Heights Art Theater, Wood founded 'Citizens for Freedom of the Mind'.