Living Room - Nick Waplington

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.