Photographer Richard Billingham was born into the world of Cider drinking, cat loving parents Ray and Liz not long after came a baby brother called Jason. His farther was an unemployed drunk his mother was larger than life and devoted to the two boys and her cats, they lived on a council tower block in Cradley Heath.
The series is based around the photographers dysfunctional family, who are torn apart by alcohol and poverty. The book depicts his alcoholic father (in images such as him sitting by the toilet after just being sick, below), squalid surroundings and violent interactions between the family members. It is raw footage of Billingham’s closest family members, that shows a sometimes-uneasy portrayal of their lives.
However, the images are contrasted with moments of love and happiness, and when I first went through the book from cover to cover, I was brought almost to tears of joy with the image of his grinning father lying in bed. This book takes you from despair to happiness with only a turn of the page, and is one of the most compelling photo-stories I have ever read.
Some of Richard’s own words:
“My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic.
He doesn’t like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
She likes pets and things that are decorative.
They married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with Ray and Liz again.
Recently he became a father.
Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he’s always been an
alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years.
He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
Originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation,
sold the house. Then we moved to the council tower block,
where Ray just sits in and drinks.
That’s the thing about my dad, there’s no subject he’s interested
in, except drink.”
“It’s not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise,
be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it -
in all these photographs I never bothered with things like
the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched.
I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed
at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.”
“Sometimes Jason is there, sometimes he isn’t. He lives at a lot of different addresses. Now he’s got a kid. When I used to come home from college, he was in care. He ended up coming back to Mum and Dad to do his A-levels, but after about a month he didn’t bother getting up in the mornings and just jacked it in. He said he had no freedom when he was in care. Now he has loads. He just didn’t have any motivation.”
“My Mum will be looking at the book and if she hasn’t got full concentration on it she will say, ‘Pass me a fag, Ray.’ They relate to the work but I don’t think they recognize the media interest in it, or the importance. I don’t think that they think anything of it, really. They are not shocked by it, or anything. We’re used to living in poverty.”
“In all these photographs I never bothered with things like the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.”
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html
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