Billingham’s photographic series of his father is a starkly intimate, bordering on claustrophobic, portrayal of family life
Ray looks adrift in his own world. He’s frequently pictured holding a bottle, pint or wine glass, or can of alcohol; frequently sitting, gazing off in some direction, slumped against walls, or lying on the floor of his home. Ray first entered public consciousness when he appeared in the artist – his son – Richard Billingham’s photographic series Ray’s a Laugh, originally published as a photobook in 1996.
Ray’s a Laugh is a starkly intimate portrayal of the artist’s family life, at home in Cradley Heath, west of Birmingham; it also pictures his mother, Liz, brother Jason and their pets. The images (some newly published here) oscillate between bleak desolation and glimmers of tenderness. Photographs of Billingham’s home environment, with its stained walls and the detritus of daily life (soiled clothing, a bottle of Baby Bio beside a dead cactus, so many vases of fake flowers, a Bisto pot filled with pens), portray a home that suffers from neglect, but which, at the same time, is filled with considered touches: a yellow bedspread, an antique oil lamp, the prints hanging on their walls (including Dalí’s Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937), all the small things the family values. It is filthy and falling apart but loved.
Amid this claustrophobic domesticity, Billingham finds respite from the chaos: a rainbow arching over the town, a bird perched on a branch. His use of colour and black-and-white photography also serves as a narrative device. An overexposed Liz and Ray, in a rare embrace, blazes in yellow and orange, contrasting with the sombre reality presented in monochrome. These black-and-white images, of Ray slumped by his bed, or clutching a bottle of vermouth, reveal something of the despair and loneliness of alcoholism that colour can’t convey.
But Billingham also captures instances of joy and care: a grinning Liz feeding a newborn kitten, Ray cradling his grandchild, the family’s prized mugs hanging on a wall, a wobbly homemade cake. Ray’s a Laugh is not just a document of a family’s struggle with poverty and addiction, but a complex and deeply human narrative of what it is to be trapped in cycles of love, neglect and self-destruction. Billingham’s work challenges the viewer to look beyond the surface, finding beauty and dignity where society often chooses not to look.
Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham. Mack, £60 (hardcover)
