The big picture: Nick Waplington’s perfectly poised models

Waplington describes the series of photographs he began in 1989 as “a record of a different way of being, a different time in New York, before its nightlife was radically changed, eradicated in Giuliani’s clean-up of the city”. In frame after frame of We Dance in Mysteries: The Isaac Mizrahi Photographs, at Hamiltons Gallery in Mayfair, we alternate between light and dark, day and night. We see the Vogue cover girls of the 1990s backstage, at fittings for Mizrahi’s first collection, and on the hedonistic dance floors of after-hours Manhattan.

Waplington travelled the US from a young age with his father, who worked as a scientist in the nuclear industry. He admired the pioneering American colour photographers Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld, among others, and found, with the daring of youth, that he could seek them out in person.

In New York, Waplington called up the portrait photographer Richard Avedon and asked whether he could visit his studio. The meeting was fateful: when Avedon proved too expensive for a Mizrahi campaign, he suggested Waplington for what would be his first commercial job.

Today, Waplington uses the same camera – reportedly a Fuji 6x9, discontinued in the late 1990s, with eight frames per roll – and the same method of relentless shooting. “Reloading was the only thing that slowed me down,” he says of that 1989 job. He captured moment after moment but often knew, while taking it, which photograph was the one. And it was never just an image of fashion, but a document of time.

We Dance in Mysteries: The Isaac Mizrahi Photographs is at London’s Hamiltons gallery until 23 September

Photograph by Nick Waplington