Artist Talk with Nick Waplington

Join Picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom for an evening with Nick Waplington to celebrate Aperture’s new edition of his monograph Living Room.

Nick Waplington’s first book, Living Room (Aperture, 1991), was an instant sensation within the photography world and beyond, and it remains an important depiction of 1980s working-class Britain. The original edition of Living Room documented the lives of friends, families, and neighbors on the Broxtowe housing estate in Nottingham, England, where Waplington spent years making thousands of images. An extensive archive of unseen photographs from this series forms the basis of this conceptual remake, one that revisits and refashions Waplington’s iconic work from a contemporary vantage point. This new edition follows the same sequencing of landscape and portrait images as the original, replacing each of the fifty-nine 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.

Tickets can be reserved through Picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom’s Eventbrite page. 

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Nick Waplington: Living Room

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Living Room Limited Edition Book and Print Set

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Nick Waplington (born in Aden, Yemen, 1965) is a British artist living between London and New York. He has published extensively throughout his career, including Safety in Numbers (1997), Truth or Consequences (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.

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Image: Nick Waplington, 1991; from Nick Waplington: Living Room (Aperture, 2024). © 1991 by Nick Waplington