Richard Billingham is an British photographer, artist, cinematographer and teacher who was born in 1970. He is best known for his photographic Book ‘ Ray’s a laugh’ which observes his somewhat ‘dysfunctional’ family in his project where his father, Ray, is an alcoholic and his mother, Liz, is very heavily tattooed and obese.
The way he takes his photos is quite similar to what you would expect to see in a family album however there seems to be quite a melancholic felling about these images, mostly due to the colours within the photographs, they are quite dull and cold which is the opposite to what you would expect from family photographs, personally I would expect warmth and more flattering images shown of my family members.
Richard Billingham, from series Ray’s a Laugh, 1994
It seems rather unusual that Billingham would choose to take this photograph of his mother glaring and clenching her fist at his father. He had no intentions of hiding what his family is like which I find to be quite unusual as most people would try to hide anything wrong about their families, especially from the whole world to see.
I admire Richard Billingham for this as he has no shame in showing what his family are really like, which is something you do not come across very often. He is showing that not all families are perfect and that we all have faults in them, but we choose not to make those faults public.
'Gordan MacDonald: How did your parents feel about you taking up art?
Richard Billingham: They were indifferent to it. They probably liked it because, if I was drawing, I was occupied and didn't need looking after.' (https://photoworks.org.uk/richard-billingham/, 2007)
After reading the interview he had with Gordan MacDonald, founding editor of Photoworks Magazine, I realised that it seems his parents gave him little attention as they appeared to be preoccupied with other things. I realise now that the soul purpose of these images was not to be displayed as photographs; they were taken as raw material for paintings. It was only when the editor for the Telegraph was made aware of them that they started to become displayed. Billingham had almost no intention of them being seen, especially not by such a broad audience. However, he also does not seem bothered that the images have been viewed as he states - 'I don't owe them anything and I never thought they would be shown in a gallery at that stage anyway. I thought they would be in a book and it would have a specialist market and not really a wide audience.' (Richard Billingham, 2007). After he realised these images were going to become part of a project, he started researching into photographers and looking at how they complete projects. This probably worked as a sort of phototherapy for him in the way that he was able to take photographs of his family the way that he sees them.
I found this project to be very inspiring towards my current project as I feel Jake's nan is not your every day 'stereotype' of a grandmother as she does not cook, or knit or do any of the kind of things you would expect your grandmother to do. As she is sort of a, as she calls it: surrogate grandmother to me, I find this idea rather intriguing. She often tells me stories that are quite unconventional but also quite hilarious. Due to her being this way of 'not what you would expect from a grandmother' I feel 'Ray's a Laugh' has helped me get a better understanding of how to approach taking photographs of her and how to show this different side of her.
‘Not only is the situation unseemly and somewhat repulsive, as the mother hardly conforms to the pattern according to which she has been arranged’ (Orskou, 2003). As the mother is not what you would expect, due to her being severely obese and heavily tattooed, it seems to cause an uproar to some of the viewers as they may find it ‘repulsive’ however I agree with the next quote - …‘it is an image of love for his mother - Orskou finds it repulsive because it does not conform to her notion of correct feminine motherhood’ (Hatherley, 2018, p.365). Billingham does not have another view of what a mother ‘should’ look like, and so this is what he is hat he knows, and it proves that there is not stereotype however as humans we tend to create these sort of expectations and like to judge people when they do not conform to them.