Wood is best known for his photographs in Liverpool and Merseyside from 1978 to 2001, "on the streets, in pubs and clubs, markets, workplaces, parks and football grounds" of "strangers, mixed with neighbours, family and friends.

[6] He has explored a "multiplicity of formally divergent themes and quotations"[7] with an approach "much more fluid than the current conventions of post-Conceptual photography or photojournalism dictate".

[5] The pictures in Wood's first book and most famous series, Looking For Love (1989), show people up close and personal at the Chelsea Reach disco pub in New Brighton, Merseyside, where he photographed regularly between 1982 and 1985.

"[12][19] Phill Coomes of BBC News wrote that "wherever they were taken or made, his pictures seem always to have a trace of human existence, and at their centre they are about the lives that pass through the spaces depicted.

"[1] The New Yorker's photography critic, Vince Aletti, described Wood's style as "loose, instinctive and dead-on" adding "he makes Martin Parr look like a formalist".