Nick Waplington

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As featured in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal and The Sunday Times

An expansive and timely survey on contemporary British photographer and artist Nick Waplington, with work spanning his entire 40-year career – his first comprehensive retrospective volume

London- and New York-based artist Nick Waplington uses photography to capture the complex and far-reaching aspects of our lived experience. He rose to prominence in the early 1990s with Living Room and has since become known for his unfiltered depictions of people and places, and the sociopolitical backgrounds that define them.

From the chaos, violence, and euphoria of riots, protests, and free parties to the surreal, hypnotic quiet of his large-format landscapes, Waplington’s work (in all its messy humanness) transcends stereotypes and confounds expectations, and this book is no exception. Including never-before-published images, offering new insight into both well- and lesser-known projects, as well as Waplington’s painting and artistic practice, the book opens with a newly commissioned introduction from Simon Baker, one of the leading curators of contemporary photography in Europe and director of the Maison Européenne de la photographie (MEP), Paris.

This is the most extensive survey of Waplington’s work to date, and includes previously unpublished photographs, as well as paintings, sketchbooks, and other artworks that complement his practice.

Nick Waplington is a British artist living between London and New York. He has published extensively throughout his career, including Safety in Numbers (1995), Truth or Consequences (Phaidon, 2001), Working Process (2013), a collaboration with Alexander McQueen, Hackney Riviera (2019), and Anaglypta (2020). Waplington has exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and in 2015, was the first living British artist to have a solo photographic exhibition in the main galleries of Tate Britain, London.

Simon Baker is a curator, writer, and educator, and is currently director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. Formerly, he was senior curator of international art at the Tate Modern, London

Wall Street Journal’s Best Photography Books of 2023

‘Encompassing a broad range of mediums, Waplington’s work, as seen in this publication, is diverse and ever-changing, and yet, what unites all of it, is an endless curiosity.’ – Creative Review

‘Expansive and timely.’ – 10 Magazine

‘A poignant reminder of just how radical it [is] to tell it like it is.’ – Blind Magazine

‘The word “comprehensive” might suggest a definite account or an objective overview, but in Nick Waplington’s world – photographic or otherwise – there are innumerable detours and digressions. Looking at his work made over the past four decades it’s clear that this book isn’t a formal retrospective, rather it is an open ended conversation across time, a visual record of the unexpected pleasures of life and a desire to capture them.’ – Matthew Higgs, Director, White Columns, New York

‘Nick Waplington’s images assail us with an observed reality, yet at the same time offer something that is only obscurely and subversively familiar to us. This is because it creates eruptions from beneath the threshold of our consciousness. It’s that disconcerting recognition of the other that makes for great art. He is one of the best around.’ – Irvine Welsh, writer

‘With an uncanny brew of empathy and abandon, Waplington makes photography an adventure, diving into the mayhem and messiness of life to embrace its unruly magic. His is a rare kind of cultural portraiture, a personal register of personalities, subtly limning the politics and poetics of the circumstantial.’ – Carlo McCormick, critic and curator

‘Margaret Thatcher, in whose sinister shadow so many artists of Nick Waplington’s generation came of age, once famously claimed, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” A ridiculous, deeply reactionary claim of course – but at least Waplington was there to photograph these men, women, and families. This is an indispensable document – the responsive eye at its most observant.’ – Dieter Roelstraete, curator

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