Nick Waplington in Conversation with Drew Sawyer

Join Nine Orchard for a conversation between artist Nick Waplington and curator Drew Sawyer about the artist’s diverse body of work over the last thirty years, including Aperture’s new edition of his first book Living Room.

Capacity is limited. RSVP is required but does not guarantee entry. Only the first 175 guests with e-mail confirmation will be admitted. Doors at 6 p.m. The conversation will begin at 7 p.m.

Nick Waplington’s Living Room (Aperture, 1991), was an instant sensation within the photography world and beyond upon its initial release, 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.

Related Items

Nick Waplington: Living Room

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Living Room Limited Edition Book and Print Set

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Drew Sawyer is the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he recently organized the exhibition “Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation,” on view now at the museum. He is also co-curator of the upcoming 2026 Whitney Biennial with with Marcela Guerrero. An accomplished curator and art historian, Sawyer has focused on the intersection of art and social movements of the 1930s and 1970s, as well as queer art histories and contemporary practices in the U.S. 

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