Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh, documenting the life of his alcoholic father and his violent mother, Liz, in the Black Country council flat in which he grew up, became a landmark in British photography after it was first published in 1996. Billingham was then 26. He had intended the candid pictures of his chaotic home, with its menagerie of pets, its sense-overloading furnishing, its unhinged scenes of domestic squalor, to be studies for paintings he planned for his art degree course at Sunderland University. Instead, having been “discovered” by a tutor, the pictures took on a life of their own. Charles Saatchi included Billingham’s pictures of Ray, shirtless and swigging from beloved plastic bottles of home brew, and Liz, a confusion of outsize dresses and tattoos and unfinished jigsaws and TV dinners, in his Sensation show. Billingham was subsequently nominated for a Turner prize.
Nearly three decades on, Billingham is publishing a new edition of Ray’s a Laugh, a “director’s cut” that is closer to his original intention, even more full of complicated affection and disgust and black comedy and overwhelming anxiety about his family life. The flashlit shock of the original is preserved but is given depth and context in a series of previously unseen images. Several, like this one, add a different note to the series: sadder, less deranged.
Billingham has never exorcised those emotions from his work. I interviewed him a couple of times about the film he made in 2018, Ray & Liz, that brought to life the world of the pictures and won a number of prizes internationally. For the first of those stories we went back to the tower block in Cradley Heath, a decade after his parents had died. He hoped then, he said, that he may be saying his last word on those formative years. This new book suggests he remains compelled to make sense of them.
Ray’s a Laugh is published by MACK