For my artist research I will be looking at Richard Billingham. Richard Billingham is an English photographer born on September 25th, 1970. He is best known for his photo book Ray’s A Laugh which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese and heavily tattooed mother, Liz.
Billingham was born in Birmingham and studied as a painter at Bourneville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in a body of work later added to and published in the acclaimed book Ray’s A Laugh in 1996. Ray’s a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation which he grew up in. The photographs were taken on the cheapest film camera he could find that provided colours and bad focus which adds to the authenticity and the vintage look of the photos in the series. His father, Ray and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, with the alcoholic father drunk at home, and the mother, an obese chain smoker with an apparent fascination for nicknacks and jigsaw puzzles.
In 1997, Richard Billingham was featured in the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art which included many of the Young British Artists. In that same year, he won the Citigroup Photography Prize. He was even shortlisted for the 2001 Turner Prize for his solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
The reason I chose to look at Richard BIllingham was because although he did an entire photographic project based around his parents in their sense of place and made the ordinary seem interesting. This is known as banal. I like his examples of his parents sitting on the couch eating dinner because it is something my family occasionally does and i found a bit of humour through these images. i reminds me of my family and my sense of place because family time is important and as a family we eat together every night, however, Billingham’s images clearly portray that his parents can be very lazy and enjoy sitting in front of the television and eat their food.
Photo by Richard Billingham, 1995
