Nick Waplington: Comprehensive

The volume is built to feel definitive. It is thick, heavy, chronological, a Phaidon career survey that means to gather Nick Waplington whole and set the total on a shelf as a verdict. The heft makes a promise: everything is here, and everything adds up. The trouble starts the moment you test the second half of that promise.

Waplington has never held still. Council-estate living rooms, rave floors, West Bank settlements, abstract still lifes, the studio of Alexander McQueen: the projects sit side by side without much conversation between them. Gathered comprehensively, the restlessness that felt like curiosity inside any single project starts to look like a photographer changing subjects faster than he develops them.

The deeper problem is that one body of work towers over the rest. Living Room, his early-1990s color photographs of two working-class families in Nottingham, is genuinely important, all wide-angle chaos and unforced affection, praised at the time by John Berger and Richard Avedon. Set inside a comprehensive edit, those pictures lose the room they need. A landmark gets filed as one chapter among a dozen.

The same flattening hits the other peaks. The rave work has real energy, the McQueen collaboration real access, the settlement photographs real risk, and each deserves to be argued for on its own terms. Lined up end to end, they blur into a single note: Waplington was there, and then he was somewhere else.

Sequence works against the highs, too. A viewer coming to the work fresh meets the masterpiece early and then watches the survey dilute it, project by project, until the through-line thins to biography: this happened, then this, then this. Range documented is not the same as range that pays off, and the edit rarely pauses long enough to make the distinction.

The case for the breadth is not nothing. A restless eye is a legitimate way to spend a career, and there is something bracing about a photographer who refuses to shoot the same success twice. Seen generously, the survey is a portrait of appetite, of a man who kept following his attention wherever it wandered.

Generosity is a lot to ask of a retrospective this size, though. The comprehensive impulse serves the completist and the archivist, not the reader trying to work out why Waplington matters. A tighter selection would have made the stronger claim; instead the volume mistakes coverage for argument, and lets its finest work compete with its own footnotes.

Which is the paradox of the thing sitting so solidly on the shelf. Its weight promises a summation and delivers an inventory. The definitive Waplington is somewhere inside it, thinner, sharper, and mostly still set in a Nottingham living room.