In 1986, Nick Waplington began documenting the lives of families on the Broxtowe council estate in Nottingham where his grandad had lived for 50 years. His first book, Living Room, gave the viewer a front-row seat to the chaotic world of a neighbour called Janet and her life-loving kids and friends. Some saw the pictures as exploitative. A Guardian critic suggested that Waplington, “had gone visiting the natives to bring back news of their exotic doings and strange gear”. The novelist Irvine Welsh responded in defence of Waplington’s project, writing: “There is no voyeuristic intrusion in this work. You see Nick appearing – as much a subject as anyone else – in his cluttered, crowded pictures, engaging in the mucking about…”
Waplington followed Living Room with a book that focused on Janet and her new partner, Clive, and their wedding day; pictures, including this one, that are included in a new retrospective book of his work, Comprehensive. Looking back on those images now, Waplington tells me that, when it came to the wedding, he was the obvious choice as photographer. “There is a certain element of voyeurism in all documentary photography,” he says, “but I was trying to work with the people in my pictures long term. They became very relaxed around me and so some of the scenes are quite hardcore.” He distrusted, he says, that tradition of photographing families like Janet’s in grainy black and white, “to make them look miserable in damp houses”. His experience, he says, “was something more positive… I just enjoyed being with them”. This particular picture came towards the close of a long day that had begun in early-morning excitement and dressing up, and which was ending in the pub on Alfreton Road in Nottingham, a couple of doors down from where he was living. “I had no choice but to stay to the bitter end,” he says.
Comprehensive by Nick Waplington is published by Phaidon (£69.95)
