The artist gained significant recognition very early in his career for his seminal project, The Living Room, which documents the daily existence of a working class, Nottingham family in the late eighties and early nineties. Waplington's photos here give a lovingly discordant view of a dysfunctional family, juxtaposing images of tenderness, depravity, happiness and aggression.
Waplington has also collaborated extensively with artist Miguel Calderon. Episode 10, one of their recent series of digitally manipulated photographic collages, depicts a grey-haired man smoking in a short, grey dressing gown. The subject, on first glance, appears to be sitting alone in a strange, pink bedroom. The viewer gradually becomes aware of a young, blonde woman, who is seen standing naked in the dressing table mirror. Another collaboration resulted in a graphic novel, which takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the New York art world through the chronicles of fictional fashion model turned art star, 'Terry Painter'. The artists have also co-produced large-scale paintings from the book.
You Love Life, Waplington's most recent publication, presents an enigmatic, chronological journey through his archive of 35 mm photographs. The artist was interested in reapproaching these photographs, which date back to his teens, partly to understand, 'why I took these pictures in the first place'. In bringing a plethora of subjects together, each captured in Waplington's distinctive style, the book bears testament to the artist's significant contribution to the field of photography.
For his recent show at Museum 52, Waplington has produced a series of large format images that examine photography's traditional uses and relationship to public trickery. In its early days, photography was sometimes used by pseudo-scientists to prove fantastical or scientific points. Relatively uninformed of the manipulability of the medium, the public of that period generally perceived such photographs to be a recording of truth, fact and reality. By mixing straightforward photography with the constructed and manipulated, Waplington's new series explores this hinterland that exists between art, science and psychology.
Nick Waplington is the author of a number of photographic books including Living Room (1991), Safety in Numbers (1997), Truth or Consequences (2001) and Learn How to Die the Easy Way (2002), as well as a short film entitled Nothing for BBC 2. Solo exhibitions include Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, 1992, Photographer's Gallery, 1995, and Underwood Street Gallery, 1999. More recently, the artist exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale, where he showed work in the Italian Pavillion and created an installation/intervention for the Arsenale. Entitled Learn How to Die the Easy Way, this latter piece comprises a series of websites that parodied the idiosyncrasies of the modern, capitalist age. Waplington's work is in a number of international collections including MoMA, the Government Art Collection, the British Council and The Guggenheim.