Bilingham Documentary photography

The British artist Richard Billingham photographed his family–his alcoholic father, large mother, and unruly brother–in their council flat in the West Midlands, England, between 1990 and 1996, producing the photo book Ray’s a Laugh (1996). It departs from the typical images of wedding/new baby/graduation/birthday family photographs, revealing the artist’s rough childhood surroundings and life in a council flat. The photo book was an immediate success.

Billingham’s family series is often seen as a representation of poverty, even a “human catastrophe.” When the Labour Party won the 1997 election in the United Kingdom, one of its key goals was to end child poverty in a generation and to create a new welfare settlement that would meet the needs of twenty-first century Britain. The young artist’s photographs of his childhood surroundings, a council flat, seemed to encapsulate the need for the political change. Gilda Williams in Art Monthly suggests that Billingham’s interiors are a metaphor for the politics that aim to unmask the accident of poverty. For Mark Durden in Parachute: “Billingham’s representation of his working-class family’s poverty and violence … [stages] personal degradation and suffering.”