Nick Waplington - Living Room

British photographer Nick Waplington spent four years documenting the daily lives of two working-class families on a council estate in Nottingham, England. Rather than accepting the contemporary photographic conventions of social realism, Waplington recorded the lives of these families, capturing an intimate narrative with both sadness and unexpected humour.  These photographs taken in the late 1980s in England, where the people had already gone through ten years of Conservative government, the collapse of industry, the rise in poverty and unemployment. The two families that Waplington had photographed had been living witnesses of this difficult time.

As the viewer we are seeing the rare unseen side of the family unit, showing the viewer to every intimate moment from cleaning the home to a family relaxing. It is in the living room that is where most of the daily scenes of these families take place, which links to the title Living Room, which was also used as a background for the ongoings within these homes.

With these images we are shown somethings intimate made public, we are shown somethings about these families that we would not usually know as we do not know personally the two families photographed. Nick Waplington makes no dramatic social statements, but instead shows a quite touching record of the daily struggle of the working-class in their homes. 'Living Room' is documenting the dysfunctional families bearing the difficulty of economic problems.

Within my own work I am staging different scenarios within a small living room and at first I found it really challenging with trying to fit in everything in the shot. However looking at Waplington's series of work I have noticed that as I am staging my images I have full control, I can remove and add into a scene as much as I want but only things that have some significance. Again with working in small spaces it is ok for things to be cropped out as it may even help with making the image have oxygen, showing movement and life.