Exhibition: Nick Waplington: Living Room

Hamiltons debuts 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.