By SU WU MARCH 30, 2016

The photographer Nick Waplington famously captured Alexander McQueen as he prepared his final winter collection, which became the basis for “Working Process,” a show held last year at the Tate. But Waplington’s latest exhibition, “A Display of Panic in a Moment of Absolute Certainty,” opening Saturday at the Los Angeles gallery These Days, contains no snapshots whatsoever — rather, it is comprised solely of paintings and drawings. Much like the McQueen series, which the designer wanted to be “dirty and messy,” Waplington’s new work reveals a constant concern of his 30-year career: an affinity for barely contained chaos, whether in garbage dumps, the hills above the West Bank city of Ramallah or the maelstrom of fashion shows. None of the paintings in the show, Waplington’s first stateside exhibition sans photography, have a single vantage point, a conscious choice to make it “deliberately difficult to perceive order,” he explains. “My paintings deal with this inner world, whereas my photographic work deals with the world around me,” says Waplington, who will appear Thursday in New York at the Rizzoli bookstore alongside Isaac Mizrahi, whose backstage scene he documented every season from 1989 to 1993. “I guess the basic difference is with photography the canvas is full and with painting it’s empty. Both give me problems.”

Indeed, at These Days, a gallery known for championing punk history, Waplington’s exhibition, curated by the art adviser Thomas Solomon, takes its title from a sense of volatility. The “visual scrambling” within the works is a “metaphysical representation of mass hysteria, that moment within a society when the constructed order breaks down and collectively society starts to implode and there is a release of pressure, the kettle blows and a state of chaos envelopes the multitude,” as Waplington says. This mental state, the teetering before the fall, “always turns out to be a false alarm — but it is an interesting thing to make art about, for sure.”

In the meantime, he creates a more personal “year zero approach” whenever he starts to feel the encroachment of technique. “I think it is important to keep things in flux,” says Waplington, who began keeping sketchbooks while living in Santa Monica in the 1990s and moved back to Southern California from London last year. Many of the works in the show have been made since then, as Waplington has focused almost exclusively on painting in his outside studio near Los Angeles’s Elysian Park during the “long hours of sunlight,” taking a run in the hills before the heat comes. The city’s inchoateness is a conducive environment for tackling a particular problem of painting, the photographer says — especially the sometimes agonizing ability to, “start from nothing” over and over, especially for an artist who seems to resist calm.

The pieces in the show “seem to take place somewhere high above the city looking down on its mazes of freeways and wide streets; it’s energetic, gestural and free-feeling much like the city itself,” says Stephen Zeigler, who founded These Days with his wife, Jodi, in a 1887 building downtown that has had various histories as a piano shop, a headquarters of a youth communist group and a flophouse. The couple first discovered Waplington’s work through the book “Surf Riot,” shot during a spontaneous melee after a 1986 surf contest. (Jodi, who was on the Huntington High School surf team, was present at the event.) “I didn’t want to be on some sort of treadmill of production,” Waplington says of his eye for upheaval — unless, of course, destruction can be productive. He admits that he works every day so that problems that arise in one piece can be addressed in the next: “I am seeking and searching constantly. People ask me what I find interesting, and the answer is everything.”