Nick Waplington on the Hackney Riviera, grammar school, the post-punk ethos, not having a plan B, being ‘on it’ and his “all day, every day practice”.
Nick Waplington is a photographer and a painter, who divides his time between New York, where he lives with his English professor wife and their young son, and London where his older son lives and where has a studio and live/work space.
He has produced many photobooks over a thirty year career, collaborating with established publishers such as Aperture, Cornerhouse, Mack, Phaidon and Trolley, producing low-fi, zine style publications in small numbers and more recently self-publishing through Jesus Blue, the imprint he founded this year with his friend, the designer Jonny Lu.
His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and The Photographers' Gallery in London, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions, In 1993 he was awarded an Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Gallery of Australia, among others.
Nick travelled extensively during his childhood as his step-father (who he thought at the time was his biological father) worked as a scientist in the nuclear industry. He studied art at West Sussex College of Art & Design in Worthing, Trent Polytechic in Nottingham and the Royal College of Art in London. From 1984, Nick would regularly visit his grandfather on the Broxtowe Estate in Aspley, Nottingham, where he began to photograph the surroundings and some of the families who lived there. He continued with this work on and off for the next 15 years and from it came two books, Living Room and Weddings, Parties, Anything, as well as numerous exhibitions.
Other bodies of his work include Safety in Numbers (1997), a bleak study of the ecstasy drug culture in the mid-1990s; The Indecisive Memento, a global road trip where the journey itself was the artwork (1999); Truth or Consequences (2001), a pictorial game based on the history of photography using the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico as a backdrop, inspired by the rules of the 1950s television show; and You Love Life (2005), in which he uses pictures taken over a 20-year period to construct an autobiographical narrative.
Nick worked on a major book project with the fashion designer Alexander McQueen during 2008/2009, called Working Process (2013), the title referring to both McQueen's working process as a fashion designer and Waplington's working process as an artist making photo books. In March 2015 this project became the first one-person exhibition by a British photographer in the main exhibition space at Tate Britain in London.
Nick participated in the photography collective This Place, founded by Frédéric Brenner, contributing the book Settlement (2014), a study of Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, portrait and landscape photographs taken with a large format camera.
While continuing to make photographic works Waplington has since 2010 devoted much of his time to his practice as a painter.
On episode 118, Nick discusses, among other things:
Referenced:
“The whole world is changing very fast because of new technologies and the internet or whatever. You have to adapt. I’m kind of insulated from the changes in photography because I operate in the art world which is about, on a very base level, you make expensive things that rich people buy. And that hasn’t changed.”