Made Glorious Summer gathers Nick Waplington’s earliest photographs around the charged years 1979–1984, when punk music, political unease, records, friendship, and adolescence formed the atmosphere of Britain. The book is rooted in Waplington’s own life: a family move from Woking, Surrey, to Steyning, West Sussex, his school years in both places, and the private materials he preserved while trying to understand the world and his place within it.

Its method is deliberately composite. Black-and-white photographs made by Waplington between 1980 and 1985 appear alongside a smaller number of colour images from the period, photographs of the artist taken by friends, selected seven-inch singles, personal memorabilia, and colour landscapes of Woking made in September 2009. The resulting structure is not a straightforward chronology. Memory is assembled through juxtaposition, with music, objects, faces, domestic traces, forest, and the blackened sea of Britain acting as connected fragments.

The restriction to seven-inch records gives the project a clear formal boundary: these are the singles Waplington bought at the time, with only a few later additions. That decision keeps the archive personal and prevents the accumulation of cultural reference from overwhelming the photographic work. The later Woking landscapes add a second temporal register, allowing the remembered place to meet its subsequent image.

For collectors, the book deserves attention as an unusually direct account of an artist’s beginnings and of the photobook as a medium for private history. Published by Powershovel, Limited in 2014 as a 240-page English-language softcover, it brings together photographs, objects, and sound-related ephemera without separating lived experience from its material evidence. Its distinctive value lies in that sustained act of self-editing: a young photographer’s formative world reconstructed from what he saw, kept, listened to, and remembered.