Nick Waplington: Double Dactyl

British photographer Nick Waplington combines large format photographs of friends and family, scenes of British streets and seaside, with an added dimension of digital manipulation. Ranging from the almost undetectable, to the surreally fantastic.

Double Dactyl accompanied Nick Waplington's solo show at The Whitechapel Gallery, London, December 2007-January 2008. One of Britain's leading contemporary photographers, Waplington first came to public notice with Living Room (1991), a photographic portrait based on the everyday lives of two close-knit families in Nottingham. Since then, often working in book form, he has become known for photographing British social scenery, and his life and close circle of friends and family in East London, where he lives and works.

As an artist, Nick Waplington cannot be categorised. His work combines the enigmatic and the everyday, the complex and the straightforward, and the title of his Double Dactyl exhibition embodies these uncomfortable dualities. The word 'dactyl' comes from the Greek dactylos, a word with a mundane literal meaning: finger. In the technical language of poetic theory, however, a dactyl refers to a unit of rhythm that has three syllables, with the emphasis on the first (the long-short-short pattern resembling the joints of a finger). And yet this aesthetic terminology seems less pretentious when we realise that a double dactyl simply describes the rhythm of the artist's name: Nicholas Waplington. If the photographs in Double Dactyl are united by anything, they are united by Waplington's own multiplicity as an artist. His body of work could be described as a journey around the documentary, one that has prodded and played with notions of authenticity, authority and truth that conventionally define the genre. It could also be described as an experiment in doubleness.

UK and US-based artist Nick Waplington works with photography as a medium to submerge in communities resulting in personal involvement and visual work. He caught John Berger’s, Richard Avedon’s and the rest of the world’s attention in the 1990s with Living Room and has since then created recognisable, frank representations of people and their sociopolitical backgrounds ranging from a DIY, post Punk youth navigating Thatcherism, the heyday of House and rave culture in 1990s NYC or documenting the last collection of close friend Alexander McQueen at his London studio. Waplington has had solo shows at the Tate Britain and The Photographers Gallery in London among other institutions and his works are part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London or the Philadelphia Museum of Art.