Nick Waplington’s first book, “Living Room” (Aperture, 1991), was an instant sensation within the photography world and beyond, and remains an important depiction of 1980s working-class Britain.
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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 (Jesus Blue, 2024) 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.