Richard Billingham (born 25 September 1970) is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.

Billingham is best known for the Photobook Ray's A Laugh (1996), which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother Liz. He has also published the collections Black Country (2003), Zoo (2007), and Landscapes, 2001–2003 (2008). He has made several short films, including Fishtank (1998) He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath, a body of work later added to and published in the acclaimed book Ray's A Laugh (1996). Ray's a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation in which he grew up. However, there is such integrity in this work that Ray and Liz ultimately shine through as troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities. The critic Julian Stallabrass describes Ray and Liz as embodiments of "what is in legend a particularly British stoicism and resilience, in the face of the tempest of modernity." Also in 1997, Billingham won the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (now Deutsche Börse Photography Prize). He was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner Prize, and others.

In 1998, Billingham made his first documentary video, Fishtank, a study of his father filmed with a handheld camera. It was commissioned by Artangel and Adam Curtis for BBC Television and shown on BBC Two in December 1998. Since 2011, Fishtank has been part of the Artangel Collection – 25 notable films available for loan, free of charge, to publicly funded UK museums and galleries.

He has also made landscape photographs at places of personal significance around the Black Country, and more of these were commissioned in 2003 by the arts organisation The Public, resulting in a book.

In late 2006, Billingham exhibited a major new series of photographs and videos inspired by his memories of visiting Dudley Zoo as a child. The series, entitled Zoo, was commissioned by Birmingham-based arts organisation Vivid and was exhibited at Compton Verney Art Gallery in Warwickshire. A book of the work was published the following year.

In the following year, he created a series of photographs of "Constable Country", the area on the Essex / Suffolk border painted by John Constable. These were exhibited at the Town Hall Galleries, Ipswich.

Billingham's work was included in the 2007 BBC television series The Genius of Photography, being the subject of part 3 of the "We Are Family" episode, made by Wall to Wall Media.

In 2009–2010, Billingham participated in a collective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany titled: Ich, zweifellos.

Billingham wrote and directed his first feature film, Ray & Liz, in 2018. It is a memoir of his childhood and his parents, told in three separate time frames. Wendy Ide of The Guardian wrote: "It’s gruelling at times, but the film is extraordinary and unflinching. And remarkably, it’s made with as much love as anger."

As of 2019, he lives on the Gower Peninsular in South Wales with his wife and three kids.

Publications with contributions by Billingham

  • Strange Days: British Contemporary Photography. Milan: Charta, 1997. Edited by Gilda Williams. . Exhibition catalogue. Text in English and Italian.
  • Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. . Sensation exhibition catalogue.

Films

  • Fishtank (1998) – documentary video, 47 minutes, commissioned by Artangel and Adam Curtis for BBC television and shown on BBC Two in December 1998
  • Liz Smoking (1998) – short documentary video
  • Tony Smoking Backwards (1998) – short documentary video
  • Ray in Bed (1999) – short documentary video
  • Playstation (1999) – short documentary video
  • Ray (2016), written and directed by Billingham – 30 minutes, part 1 of 3-part feature film
  • Ray & Liz (2018) – feature film

Awards

  • 1994: Prestige Photography Prize, University of Sunderland, Sunderland<!-- Billingham does not appear to have been included in it at Brooklyn Museum --> Work from the Saatchi Gallery collection.

Collections

Billingham's work is held in the following permanent collections:

  • Government Art Collection, London: 1 print
  • Tate, London: 4 prints
  • Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 1 print

Bibliography

  • Cashell, K. (2020) Photographic Realism: The Art of Richard Billingham. 1st edn. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Outi Remes "Reinterpreting unconventional family photography: Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh series" in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (Vol. 34, No. 6, 2007) 16–19.
  • Juliana Engberg, Rikke Hansen and Outi Remes Richard Billingham: People, Places, Animals. (Southbank, Australia: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007). .

References

  • Billingham's profile at Saatchi Gallery
  • [https://www.glos.ac.uk/academic-schools/arts/staff-profiles/pages/s2106202-richard-billingham.aspx]