Richard Billingham (born 25 September 1970)
Billingham is an English photographer and artist. He was born in Birmingham and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He is best known for his photobook Ray's A Laugh, which shows the lives of his alcoholic, unemployed father Ray and obese, heavily tattooed, chain smoking mother, Liz.
He now lives in Swansea and travels widely. He is a lecturer in Fine Art Photography at the University of Gloucestershire and a third year tutor at Middlesex University. He was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2001. He was included in the exhibition Sensation at Royal Academy of Art, which consisted of Charles Saatchi's art collection and included many Young British Artists. In 1997 Billingham won the Citigroup Photography prize.
"My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic.
He doesn't like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
She likes pets and things that are decorative.
They married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with Ray and Liz again.
Recently he became a father.
Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he's always been an alcoholic.
It was just got worse over the years.
He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
Originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and,
in desperation, sold the house.
Then we moved to the council tower block,
where Ray just sits and drinks.
That's the thing about my dad, there's no subject he's interested in,
except drink."
"Its not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be political or whatever,
only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it-
in all these photographs I never bothered with things like negatives.
Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film
and took them to be processed at the cheapest place.
I was just trying to make order out of chaos."
Billingham's photos were intended as source material for paintings. Yet he decided to keep them as photos. Richard Billingham uses a candid photography, his images are not digitally manipulated or edited in any way. Instead they are straight from the camera. He would use the cheapest film he could find, because the film was so cheap it provided brash colours and bad focus, which adds to the authenticity and frankness of the series.
Billingham's parents at first glance appear as grotesque figures, yet they are deeply human and so their flaws and personalities begin to touch the viewer. What should be repelling instead compels and makes you want to know the subjects.
The critic Julian Stallabras describes Ray and Liz as embodiments of "what is in a legend a particulary British stoicism and resilience, in the face of the tempest of modernity." Billingham's photos show a magnificence in poverty and pain, in tragedy, of brilliance in ugliness, an aesthetic tour-de-snapshot force of intrusion and realism. They are photographs that would be thrown away instead are "limited editions" a feast for the eyes.
These photographs are a stark, painful and often humorous documentation of the emotional, sometimes violent relationship of his parents and brother. They are to be seen as a series rather than isolated images, which is why he put them into a photobook. Billingham also produced videos that explore his family life.
