Spanning the period when Nick Waplington began making photographs in the early 1980s to the present day, Sit Up Straight, Eat from the Plate, Vegetables Meat, Pudding for a Treat features works from his latest, limited edition book You Love Life (Trolley Books), as well as several large-scale new works, which have been 10 years in the making. Saturated in color, these large-format photographs expose, warts and all, the underlying, sometimes unnervingly surreal character of the every day.

Waplington’s expansive photographic vision runs the gamut of lived experience, ranging widely over moments of genuine poetic beauty to images of the grotesque and the base. Traversing visual terrain as varied as a crowded London club to streams of rushing water in the Welsh countryside, Waplington invests his most personal experiences with universal significance. Witness an image of the birth of his son, as well the social ferment of the Glastonbury Music Festival. A fly on the wall during the unveiling of his own life and that of thousands of others, Waplington’s photography crashes the party or disaster that is everyday life, emerging with a visual record that is unique in its intimacy, kind-heartedness and, ultimately, compassion.

Beginning with his influential book Living Room (Aperture 1991), which featured introductions by Richard Avedon and John Berger, and later with his second book The Wedding (Aperture 1996), Waplington has continually produced images that have achieved cult status in Britain and won photographic awards.

Waplington has exhibited in the National Museum of Photography, Bradford, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Burden Gallery, Aperture, New York; Royal Photographic Society, Bath, UK; Norton Museum, Palm Springs, FL; and Museum 52, London. His work was featured at the 49th Venice Biennial and is presently in the collections of many of the world’s leading museums, among them: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Royal Danish Photographic Museum, Copenhagen; National Gallery of Australia; The Glasgow Museum, Scotland.