Nick Waplington has been taking photographs in and around Truth or Consequences, a small town in New Mexico, for nearly ten years. Typical and unremarkable in many ways, the town voted to change its name to that of a celebrated radio quiz show in 1950. Waplington records the town behind the extraordinary name, the lives of its people and the landscape they live in while at the same time constructing a personal tribute to American photography, paying homage to such great pioneers of the genre as Edward Weston and Walker Evans.

Truth or Consequences

Arts & Photography

Waplington, Nick

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

Nick Waplington is a major new discovery in the world of photography. For his first book, this prize-winning young artist has produced a documentary "sitcom" celebrating the working-class family, offering lushly colored glimpses of "the communal spirit." 50 photographs.

Living Room

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Aperture

In his first body of work, Living Room, British photographer Nick Waplington found the chaotic, multidirectional, often joyous choreography in the everyday lives of two working-class families living in council houses in Notthingham. In Other Edens, his global series of panoramic images. Waplington imposes his body as a physical and metaphorical presence in the landscape. The omnipresent artist--head shaven, and naked so as to deny the possibility of locating him in time--appears in evocative scenes ranging from Naples to Easter Island, from the Peace Park in Hiroshima to the swamps of the Louisiana Bayou. The book's text, by renowned author Marianne Wiggins, includes an interview with Waplington about his extraordinary working methods and the far-flung locations he has chosen to photograph. Invoking the spirits of Friedrich Nietzsche, Eugene lonesco, and Peter Pan, Wiggins provides a brisk and insightful counterpoint to Waplington's exceptional imagery. Other Edens integrates personal, cultural, and comic visions to present an idiosyncratic view of a planet in flux.

Other Edens

Photography & Video

Loving, sparring, partying, cavorting, drinking, smacking, preening--the boisterous family crowding the canvas of British photographer Nick Waplington's The Wedding has spirit to spare. "The opposite of instant pictures," writes novelist and critic John Berger of Waplington's work, "these photos are as lasting for a lifetime as tattoos, yet all they show is a split second. . . . Life breathes through every one." Over the course of four years, Waplington became intimately acquainted with two large, working-class families residing in a municipal housing estate in Nottingham, England. The resulting book, Living Room (Aperture, 1991), proved the photographer had achieved an entirely unself-conscious relationship with his subjects. Five years later, Waplington is still shooting. He revisits his Nottingham friends in The Wedding, a colorful, lively visual narrative with the mesmerizing flow of a soap opera. Times have changed in one of the living rooms. The kids are older and Mum is on the verge of a new marriage. With the wedding as a centerpiece, Waplington plunges into the midst of a communal group whose upbeat lifestyle seems able to overcome all obstacles. Waplington's vibrant color images and text pulse with a visceral energy that cannot fail to draw us in. Presenting domestic drama at its most immeditately engaging and contemporary photography at its most free-wheeling, Nick Waplington's The Wedding is a singular artistic experience. Working with Waplington, the cuting-edge British writer Irvine Welsh, author of Acid House, contributes an essay illuminating the social and political context for Waplington's work. Waplington also provides a personal introduction chronicling the evolution of the "Living Room" project, his intensely close relationship with his extended family, and the nine years he has spent photographing them.

The Wedding: New Pictures from the Continuing Living Room Series

WELSH, IRVINE

Aperture Direct

The limitless boundaries of the internet, and the endless possibilities that exist in cyberspace for communication and information, are what drives Nick Waplington's survey of what this new media holds for the artist and society in general. Not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations, the internet and its implications were elaborated on for Waplington's presence at the Venice Biennale. Nick Waplington's contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2001 expresses a yearning for the artistic and commercial freedom that the web might yet expose, and a celebration of the dislocated reason behind conventional thoughts and the media they use. Somewhere out there lies the new unchartered frontier of cyberspace. In that Babel there are images, dreams, inert and vital messages, anonymous ciphers and calculating incubi. Because it is faceless, as if somehow subterranean, human dialogue and the expression of ideas can multiply without responsibility, without the parameters of authorial disciplines or social conventions. Could this be anarchy, of the kind that artists linger on street corners for? Nick Waplington, alert to these possibilities, went last year with a series of works to the Venice Biennale, which had commissioned him to elaborate on this theme. The result was undeniably the work of an artist, one who embraces the limitless avenues of freedom of expression on the internet. For Waplington the medium is certainly the message, but one far more profound than McLuhan's epithet, since this is a medium not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations. It's as if he had found himself a child again, locked in the toy shop overnight, where train sets would double as conveyor belts of ideas, and Action Man as a table leg. "If, as I suspect," says Waplington, "the internet has broken the stranglehold of governments and large media corporations on mass communication, then we could be in for a very exciting period of development on a number of different levels. Would a breakdown of current modes of social, moral and political cohesion be too much for a man to ask for?"

Learn How to Die the Easy Way

McCormick, Carlo

Trolley Books

A worldwide survey of youth culture, Nick Waplington's fourth book is an expose of the underground existence of young clubbers in four cities - London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Comprising a series of one-on-one portraits juxtaposed with city landscapes, the subterranean world of drugs, music and conter-culture comes alive.

Safety in Numbers

Booth-Clibborn

The Indecisive Memento

Booth-Clibborn Editions

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Books by Waplington, Nick