Getting up close and personal
As the Whitechapel Gallery's space is restricted during its radical redevelopment, the onus is on curators to conceive exhibitions for the lecture theatre and temporary lobby only. Nick Waplington solves the problem imaginatively by splitting his exhibition on and off site.
In keeping with his international reputation for close studies of family, friends and neighbourhoods, he presents an on-screen slide show entitled You Are Only What You See, using 1,000 downloaded images of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, he displays his own recent work in 14 local cafés, shops and pubs.
The 1,000 photographs in the slide-show simulate a reality TV storyboard linking private mementos made by anonymous amateurs, preserved in the copyright-free, Creative Commons zone. Waplington edits these into a subversive documentary, accompanied by a booming soundtrack of FM radio phone-ins.
It reveals young men (mostly) posing: on and off duty, in Baghdad's Green Zone, with locals, near car-bomb destruction, in desert action. Fetishistic close-ups of weapons and guns used for pranks betray a chilling obsession. But snaps of girlfriends and sisters giggling, drinking and smoking dope were their poignant reminders of normality.
Waplington's edit inevitably reflects his aesthetic and political stance - and the subtle artistry of the images sometimes matches his own work. Among these hanging among the shops' or bars' décor, there is a large, deceptively bucolic landscape with grazing cows at Toynbee Hall, E1, which reveals a decommissioned nuclear power station looming from the mist.
But the set-ups - a body dumped in a bin, a farmer spreadeagled drowned in a pond - lack the lyrical sophistication of fellow Hackney photographer Tom Hunter. The impact of the slide-show resonates long after the effect of the off-site images.
Nick Waplington
Whitechapel Gallery
Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX
