The children in the dark shimmering water of Nick Waplington’s photograph, hands joined together like links in a daisy-chain, could have swum straight out of a Victorian painting – some idealised, if faintly ominous, evocation of life deep in the English countryside.
In fact, the stream is a branch of the River Lea in east London, just across a busy road from an international-sized ice rink, and the time is last summer. In June 2018, amid Brexit chaos and World Cup fever, with temperatures soaring, Waplington – an influential photographer and painter whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern and the Venice Biennale – followed his kids and their friends to a semi-secret swimming spot known locally as the Hackney Riviera.
“It’s five minutes on a bicycle from my studio and I went there and realised it was quite beautiful and interesting,” he says. Waplington, who had never heard of the spot before despite living in the area for 28 years (people swim there only during very dry periods when the river is low), returned numerous times over the summer, taking a series of photographs now gathered in a limited edition book.
This image was captured on a weekday afternoon when it was cloudy. “I preferred those days because there were fewer people and overcast skies made the water look black,” says Waplington. “There was a group of five girls and a mother and they suddenly linked up with one girl pulling the others against the current. I took four or five pictures – there are only eight per roll of the film I was using – and I knew I’d got something.”
For Waplington, the images in Hackney Riviera hark back to Victorian and Renaissance landscape painting, but they also speak to our current moment. “It was really good to find something positive and dynamic in the time of Brexit. While the news tells us we’re living in this polarised Britain, it was great to find the antithesis of that – people in a very diverse, multicultural community getting together and having a good time.”
Hackney Riviera by Nick Waplington is available via jesusblue.co.uk
