(Re-printed edition by Errata Editions (New York) as part of their "Books on Books" series)
It would be remiss of anybody
attempting to produce a photo book referencing members of their own family not
to cite Richard Billingham’s classic photo book, ‘Ray’s a Laugh’, first published
in 1996, as being of relevance. The book, which features Billingham’s photos of
his dysfunctional family (in particular his father Ray, who was an unemployed chronic
alcoholic), has become a classic of post-modernist photographic realism. The photos were
taken between 1990 (when Billingham was 20) and 1996, shortly before the book was
published. I first saw some of Billingham’s prints of his family a few years
ago in an exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. However, the book
has long been out of print and copies of the first edition (the original print
run was for 3000 books) sell second hand for several hundred pounds – well
beyond what I would be prepared to pay for it. Luckily the book has recently been
made available as a ‘facsimile’ edition as part of a series by Errata Books
(New York) and I have purchased a copy. Although the quality of the prints in
this new edition is poor the power and emotional charge of the published
photographs is still very evident.
What I find remarkable about this
book is not the powerful day to day photo-realism of seeing a socially deprived
‘problem family’ living a disempowered day to day existence on the bread line,
but the fact that the photographs were taken by a member of that family,
somebody who had the strong will and artistic drive to move to the University
of Sunderland to study for an art degree whilst regularly still returning and
re-integrating with his family and taking more photographs of them. When Billingham
started taking photographs of his family his parents had separated and he lived
with his father, taking intimate and emotionally charged photographs of Ray that
were for his own personal use – Image 1 is a typical example.
Image 1. Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")
Later, Ray moved back in with Billingham’s
mother Liz at her flat and Billingham’s younger brother Jason returned to the
household, having been in social care. The family portraits, now taken
in the new environment of Liz's flat (complete with a menagerie of
animals, decorative furnishings and wallpaper), continued to provide an
intimate and brutally honest portrait of family life, featuring Liz and Jason as
well as Ray (for example see Images 2 and 3). The book features photos of cats,
dogs and a pet rat taken in the flat, together with a single (urban) landscape
and three appallingly bad wildlife photos, the latter representing the only
photographs in the book that were taken outdoors as Billingham sought to escape
family chaos for a short time.
Image 2. Jason and Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")
Image 3. Liz (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")
Photojournalism often highlights
the lives of people in socially deprived areas of society, for example those
living on the streets, migrants, prostitutes, drug users and abusers. However surely nobody
had, prior to the publication of this book, produced anything so brutally
honest about their close family. Billingham’s images take us into his home.
They make us feel emotions that must have manifested themselves in his
mind and they make us shudder and think “there but for the grace of god….” And
yet, for all the sadness, for all his father’s drunken antics that are captured
on film (see, for example, Image 4) and all the hopelessness of his parents’
situation there is still a feeling of a family bond, even of love between
family members.
Image 4. Ray (Richard Billingham: "Ray's a Laugh")
Why did Billingham take these
intimate photos in the first place? As Charlotte Cotton describes in her essay
describing the evolution of “Ray’s a Laugh” in the ‘Errata’ book, they were
never intended for publication. Billingham describes taking his first
photographs of Ray at home (Ray was living with Richard after Liz had left) as
a means of documenting what was happening to them, physically (for Ray), as
well as psychologically and emotionally for both. He has commented that he felt
like a wildlife photographer, documenting the behaviour of a particular species
(his family). He took a shopping bag full of these family prints to the
University of Sunderland, where some were used to produce sketches
and paintings of his father. Here the photographs were seen by a tutor (Julian
Germain) who alerted his friend Michael Collins (then picture editor of The
Daily Telegraph) regarding their potential. Thus a process started, which ended
with the publication of “Ray’s a Laugh”.
How can I relate “Ray’s a Laugh”
to my own project work? The family photos that I took were, unlike Billingham’s
images, never candid. All the archival photos that I have used were relatively
formal and often posed. Nevertheless the deterioration in my mother’s health
and mental state can clearly be traced photographically, from the ‘early years’
following my father’s death to the photos taken at Christmas 2006, a month
before she died. The fact that I am confident enough to use these latter images,
which I still find hard to look at, in a photo book that will be viewed by
people who are not a part of my family stems from the confidence gained by studying
the candid nature of Billingham’s images. “Ray’s a Laugh” is an important
stepping stone in the photographic journey from Modernist formalism to
Post-Modernist realism.
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