Nick Waplington: Living Room

14 March - 1 June 2024

Hamiltons  is thrilled to debut the gallery's first exhibition with Nick Waplington, marking the  release of previously unseen image variants and new works from his iconic series Living Room, 1991.

“I am seeking and searching constantly. People ask me what I find interesting, and the

answer is everything.” – Nick Waplington

 

Hamiltons is thrilled to debut the gallery's first exhibition with Nick Waplington, marking the release of previously unseen image variants and new works from his iconic

series Living Room, 1991.

 

Nick Waplington’s first book, Living Room, was published in 1991, and was an instant

sensation within the photography world and beyond. The 59 photographs in the original

edition documented the lives of friends, families, and neighbours on the Broxtowe housing

estate in Nottingham, England, where Waplington spent many years making thousands of

images. This extensive archive of unseen photographs forms the basis of this new

conceptual remake of the 1991 monograph, one that revisits and refashions Waplington’s

iconic work from a contemporary vantage point. This new work follows the same

sequencing of landscape and portrait images as the original edition - replacing each of the

59 photographs with an as-yet-unseen work from the Living Room archive, often from the

same roll of film as the original image. The result is both familiar and uncanny, a vivid

journey back to Thatcher’s Britain and a testament to the decades of art and life that have

elapsed between then and now.

 

Whilst Waplington’s early work was intrinsically rooted in ‘documentary’ practice, it also

challenged the conventional documentary gaze. Simon Baker, director of Maison

Européenne de la Photographie, importantly notes that Waplington employs a deeply

humanistic approach which is resistant to voyeuristic or intrusive documentation. Indeed,

Baker states: “Waplington is broadly curious and deeply committed in his work, and as

serious about family life as politics or art, or music and the social cultures around it, but

always as both witness and participant”, a method which achieves his simultaneous intimacy

and invisibility.

 

“When I thought something was going to happen, I’d pick up the camera and take some

pictures very quickly and then put the camera down. And then not take any again for a

while. You don’t want to be taking pictures all the time in a documentary-esque situation,

because otherwise it becomes about you and the camera and not the situation. It’s about

having an instinct for when something is going to happen.” – Nick Waplington.

 

Waplington’s choice of a 6x9 camera, commended by John Berger in an essay in both the

1991 and 2024 publications of ‘Living Room’, produces a landscape crop where “the forms

photographed have the space to expand, to become landscapes, or even firmaments“. The

artist’s purposeful use of colour emanates American street landscape characteristics, mixed

with a quintessentially British documentary style. Waplington reacts to what he describes as

the common “grainy, downtrodden, black and white interpretation of working-class life”;

instead, Waplington’s lens does not estrange the subjects from the viewers but turns the

domestic into public in a way where tears, screams, jokes, solace, tiredness and pleasure

have equal room.

 

ARTIST BIO:

 

UK and US-based artist Nick Waplington works with photography as a medium to submerge

in communities, resulting in personal involvement and visual work. He caught the attention

of John Berger and Richard Avedon, along with the rest of the world, in the 1990s

with Living Room and has since then created recognisable, frank representations of people

and their socio-political backgrounds. Beginning in his teenage years, his subjects have

ranged from post Punk youth culture against the backdrop of Thatcherism, to the heyday of

House and rave culture in 1990s NYC. In 2008/9 Waplington documented the production of

the last collection of Alexander McQueen at his London studio. He continues to work in

London and New York on a series of overlapping photographic and art projects.

 

Waplington has had solo shows as an independent artist across the UK and the USA,

including the Philadelphia Museum of Art (The ‘Living Room’ and ‘Circles of Civilization’

Series, 1992), The Photographers’ Gallery London (‘Living Room’ 1990-1991) and more

recently Tate Britain (‘Working Process’ 2015). His works have also featured in group shows

at the Venice Biennale (‘Learn How To Die the Easy Way’, 2001), Brooklyn Museum in New

York City (‘This Place’, 2016) and White Chapel Gallery (June-September 2017).

 

His works are part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in

New York, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London and the

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alongside being honoured with the Infinity Award: Young

Photographer in 1993 by the International Center of Photography in New York City.

Waplington practice making books and zines continues with publications like

Comprehensive with Phaidon and self-published via Jesus Blue such as Anaglypta.