Nick Waplington Interview for "Before the Clean Up" exhibition at Smilers

Interview by James Maher

N: Hi, I'm Nick Waplington, welcome to my show. All the pictures in this show were taken in clubs between 1988 and 1994. So all the pictures are taken in the kind of sleazy, nightlife period when house and techno music, and what's now become known as raving, started here in New York. I would just go out every night clubbing and I would take pictures. As I got more immersed in it I'd go to different clubs and I'd ask to take pictures. But all these pictures were taken in New York before the Giuliani cleanup at clubs here when I was living here as a young person, just going clubbing, doing the odd little job when you didn't need so much money to live in New York City as you do today.

J: When I was looking through your archive of work, you seem to be connected to communities that are a bit outsider; can you tell us about this?
     
N. Yeah, that's one portion of my work and this has become a thing in the last few years—I think my wife has identified this—that if I get into some kind of outsider, smaller community, then I enjoy the life that those people are living and it becomes part of my life, and therefore I'm photographing my life and I'm photographing those communities as well, whether it's the council estate in Nottingham that became Living Room, because my grandfather lived on the estate and I went to live with him and I started to photograph his neighbors and friends.

Then I moved here to New York and I liked house music and clubbing. I moved here to New York and Avedon set me up with a bit of work here and there, and I was able to go out and go clubbing every night and do little jobs during the day.

And I just got into this whole thing of going to clubs like Save the Robots, Factory, Area, and Body and Soul, and I would just go clubbing every night, pretty much every night, maybe have one night off a week. I would take my camera and I took pictures of what was going on here, and I didn't actually look at the pictures for years. I had the film processed, I contact sheeted it, and I just shoved it away. Then, I guess about 10 years ago, I finally got it out and started to look through the pictures.

J: How would you describe, back then, what the community itself was like—the people, the time in the city and all that?
     
N: The city back then, obviously as a young person, you were able to live in New York very cheaply. You could go out; I had a friend who had an apartment that he didn't live in. I lived at Hotel 17 on 17th Street where they gave me a free room. A lot of my friends, they would work—they were hustlers, basically. So they would be working in the sex industry during the day and we would go out at night. And that was our life really, going around the clubs, the after-hours clubs; a lot of them were in the back rooms of gambling dens on 42nd Street. You'd go up all these stairs and there'd be all these guys playing cards, and it would be like a Wednesday afternoon and it would be blacked out and there would just be hundreds of people in there, fucked up, dancing—strange things like that. I was part of that community and I was young enough that I could do that and also hold it together to make some kind of living and survive. If I ever got really bad and I was really strung out, I would go back to the UK for a couple of weeks and recover.

J: Was the UK scene similar?
     
N: Yeah, the UK scene was similar. The things that I went to in the UK were definitely more kind of techno, rave-oriented. Whereas the clubs that I went to in New York were mainly the gay clubs. They had the best music. There was a shop called Vinyl Mania on Second Street where I used to buy records, and the DJs and the owners of that shop—whatever they were involved in was always really good.

And I would gravitate to their nights and they would be predominantly gay, but there'd always be like a club-kid area. There'd be people my age in there; we'd all be congregated in that area. And it's very nice, thinking back, that these predominantly hardcore gay clubs would always let us in and were always happy to have us there. The only place that was more kind of hetero that I enjoyed really was the Limelight. The Limelight had good nights. It was always fun—more club-kiddy nights, and then more mellow and Sunday afternoons at Body and Soul with François Kevorkian or whatever.

J: Are you a good dancer?
     
N: I used to dance a lot, yeah. Before my knees went from skateboarding. Yeah, I used to dance. These pictures are taken with a medium format 6x9 camera with a Metz flash, and I'm focusing the thing in the dark.

I would wait for things to build up and I would take pictures for maybe an hour or two, and then I would put everything in the bag and put it away and I'd join in the fun. I think that's the kind of thing with a lot of my work—it's the participation, same in Living Room. I'm never in a situation where I'm taking photos and I'm just photographing and then I finish photographing and I'm gone. I take photographs for a while, I stop, and then I'm part of everything. And then maybe I'll pick up the camera again and go for a short period of time and put it down. There's no work in it for me. It's just an enjoyment of being around people that I like and I empathize with.

J: Your book, Safety in Numbers. It seems related to this?
     
N: Yeah, Safety in Numbers is related to this, a little bit later. Safety in Numbers started out initially—I just wanted to hit the road for a year, and I was still clubbing and going out and doing things. It was a bit darker at that point. This [show] is definitely more euphoric and fun. Things had got a bit more gnarly at that point. So I made the very close-up portraits and landscapes; I was just taking this theme in a slightly different direction.

And then I moved on to Los Angeles, Japan, and London. I actually took a lot of pictures for that project, also in South Africa, but I've never published them. I went there for a while; I found it very hard. I've had this kind of weird relationship with South Africa. I found that—I wanted to see if I could break that down, and I was unable to do it. I took a friend of mine, who's Iranian American, to a New Year's Eve party at someone's house, and they were like, 'You can tell your boy to wait in the car.' I looked at him and said, 'We're out of here.' So I ditched all those pictures.

But yeah, Safety in Numbers—there are composite images and the kind of flow where—I edited it on Adobe software. It's the first time I made a book edited digitally on Adobe software. Before, with all my books, we'd gone to the copy shop and we made prints. That book is much copied, and people love it. That was shot in '95, '96, and I think it was published at the beginning of '97. I think they've published three or four rounds of it now. But this work is a happier side, a more naive time than that—but probably more druggy than that, if that was possible.

J: Does that relate to how you were feeling at the time? Were you happier at this earlier period?
     
N: Yeah—no, I don't know. The early nineties, there was a recession, and things were quite bleak, but somehow the nightlife was back. I have never been to a better club than the Sound Factory, which is the place that became Twilo on 27th Street. It was out of this world. By the time we got to Safety in Numbers, it was a bit later, and dance music had changed, became a little bit more organized, a little bit more together. Whereas, if you were around in '87 and '88, no one knew what was going on. This was a completely new phenomenon, it was exciting and strange, and I was just taking pictures of it. I always thought that if I want to take the pictures that I want to take, then I'm going to have a day job. The work that I want to make, this work, the Living Room work, Safety in Numbers, I would have to fund that from doing something else.

J: When you were making these projects, did you have an idea that you wanted to turn them into books back then?
     
N: Yeah, the intention was always to make a book out of the pictures, but there was never any expectation that I could—I knew I would have to fund it. Living Room has never made me any money, but it's got me jobs that gave me money to continue. Even though, back in the day, you'd be like, 'I don't do any jobs.' It's secret. If you're an art photographer, you don't do jobs. I just think my jobs are a way of getting money to make the work I want to do. I want to make art, and the art often—not always—is photography. And there isn't much of a commercial market for photography, especially now, it's collapsed, so you've got to find ways to fund it.

J: Can you tell us about your upcoming show in London?
     
I have a show coming up at Hamiltons Gallery in London. It opens June 26th. It will be these pictures and the pictures that I took at the same time of Isaac Mizrahi working in his studio. Mr. Avedon put us together and thought we would get on. And here we are again, 35 years later—we're still friends, and I'm hoping he'll be able to come to London. I made the work with him when the supermodel generation were going through his studio and he was making clothes on them, so I have all these amazing pictures of Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford—and he's fitting them out—Naomi Campbell. And I was just this kind of gruff-looking street urchin taking pictures in the corner. I was doing that during the day, while I was doing this at night.

J: This time for you sounded very prolific.
     
N: Yeah. When you are that age, you're in your early twenties, you can go pretty much around the clock. I'm in my fifties now—I can still work very long hours now. I get up 6:30–7:00 every day, and I'm not in bed till 1:30–2:00. I was what used to be called hyperactive—there's probably new names for it now. I've never had any drugs for it to slow you down. So, yeah, I can sleep four or five hours a night now, but I could sleep two hours a night then.

J: Did you think you learned from the skater culture, just the grinding, working hard too—or is that just how you are?
     
N: Skateboarding for me was an important community that I was part of. When the craze ended and it just got down to the hardcore people, that's when I really liked it. By the early 80s, when Thrasher started, a big magazine and I was back in England at that point. There were probably 50 people [in the scene]—we all know each other still. The evolution of skateboarding for me has been fascinating, a part of my life I've really enjoyed, and I have fantastic friendships I've made through skateboarding.

Now it's in the Olympics, and it's amazing to see how many people transition to arts from an outsider culture—skateboarding—for weird kids who find each other. It is quite art-centric. I've never made skate-related art, but I appreciate its role.

I'm left-handed, dyslexic, and make art—I look for transgressive things. I come from a nice middle-class background; my father was an eminent scientist. I obviously had a life of privilege—I just like making work. Every day, I wake up excited to do it. Once I found art, I was like, 'Yes, this is me.' All I want to do every day is make art.