Billingham's Photographs example essay topic

Richard Billingham has established himself as one of the quintessential British artists of the 1990's. While in many respects, his aesthetic style remains distinctive from that of other young British artists, his work concerns issues often explored by his contemporaries. In this essay, I will discuss a selection of what I believe to be his most interesting and definitive photographs, in addition to a comparison of Billingham's work, ideology, and myth with those of principal yBa's. The son of an unemployed mechanic and an obese housewife, Richard Billingham was born in 1970 near Birmingham, England. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts in 1994 from the University of Sunderland, where as an undergraduate, he took the photographs that have become his best-known works. These large, colorful, energetic and uniformly untitled prints were taken over a period of seven years and compiled into a photo essay entitled Ray's a Laugh.

These same images were included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including MoMA's "New Photography" exhibition in 1996, and the infamous "Sensation" exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1997 and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. Originally intended to serve as studies for paintings, photographed with an ordinary auto-focus camera, and developed at the local drug store, Billingham did not consider himself much of a "photographer" and was largely unconcerned with the technical formality of photography: "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".

Accordingly, this lax method has not gone unnoticed by Billingham's critics: "Almost every rule of photography is badly broken: pictures are out of focus, over-exposed, printed with a grain so visible that the image beneath is almost completely obscured... on some very basic level, Billingham's may well be the worst photographs I've ever seen professionally published, and never mind for now that they " re also some of the best". In this respect, Billingham differs greatly from many young British artists who exhibit near-obsessive technical prowess. For instance, Ron Mueck's super realistic sculptures, Jenny Saville's mammoth nudes, and Mark Wallinger's equine portraits all consistently "wow" their audience by technique alone, inviting the viewer to endlessly wonder how much talent, how much training, and how many hours of affectionate labor went into the production of the pieces presented before them. The unrestrained aesthetic realism in the aforementioned artists' work is part of a characteristic which seems to be present throughout the breadth of the yBa's creations; as observed by Jerry Salt, .".. the YBA aesthetic -- if reduced to its simplest component -- is realism; some might say, realism with a vengeance". We may view Billingham's disconcert with photographic technique as a form of realism itself - one which reflects the typical use of the medium by every day people in every day life. From this perspective, Billingham's approach is in perfect accordance with that of his British contemporaries.

By removing the "professional" qualities from the prints, Billingham removes the artistic pretense from the photographer - With no backdrops, no lighting, no experienced models or professional processing, Billingham has no physical advantage over any amateur photographer, and all that remains to differentiate between the product of the master and the product of the novice is the intangible integration of talent which Billingham undoubtedly possesses. Naturally, it is not simply how he takes his photos, but what he is photographing which plays an enormous role in the realism of Billingham's work. The photographs are most often taken in his parent's home, a cramped lower-middle-class British housing project. The rooms are brightly painted and wallpapered, shelves and table tops often cluttered with seemingly miscellaneous and inconsequential ornaments, an aesthetic which connotes both liveliness and idle desperation. As described by Jim Lewis, "Billingham's home seems, at first glance, to be an almost comically horrible place to be, with its airless rooms stuffed full of broken-down furniture, its violence and abjection, and hopelessness, and mess". Yet there is a positive energy that perseveres in these images, and this paradox of comedy and tragedy, of animation and stagnation exists as a constant theme in Billingham's work.

The subjects are nearly exclusively his parents, Liz and Ray, his younger brother, Jason, and their menagerie of house pets, though there is an obvious concentration on his father. Billingham documents Ray's chronic alcoholism in its various manifestations, the less ambiguous shots of which include Ray lying next to the toilet bowl, several prints of Ray taking swigs of booze, and a few scuffles between Ray and Liz (This puts an interesting twist on Billingham's amateur photographic mannerisms: "In some cases it looks as if he was none too sober himself when he pressed the shutter button (Lewis) "). While the images from Ray's a Laugh form a narrative, they are simultaneously circuitous, in accordance with the lives of his subjects. As described by Billingham, "There really isn't a beginning or an end. My family always stays the same, they watch the same things, they have the same patterns to their lives, they talk about the same things (Linwood)". Such troublesome depictions of Ray's alcoholism raise several questions regarding the relationship between Billingham and Ray; as photographer and subject, but most urgently, as son and father.

"Billingham [takes] pictures that maintain a familiarity with their subject while at the same time [uphold] the cold-blooded distance of an observer (Tsing ou)". It is not Billingham's reaction to attempt to catch his father as he falls face-first out of the easy chair and onto the floor - rather, he snaps a photo of it. Likewise, the shot of Ray over the toilet inspires the same thought: "It's a remarkable photograph, claustrophobic and disorienting; still, one might notice that Billingham chose to photograph the old man and then publish the photograph, rather than immediately picking him up and cleaning him off (Lewis)". Billingham's behavior can be regarded as one of callousness and distance, or perhaps one of simple routine. As stated by Gordon Burn, "every night [Billingham] came in from college and Ray would be lying passed-out on the bed; checking his breathing was always the first thing he did. 'So taking pictures was also a way of preserving him a bit at the start.

' Seeing him on his back in the toilet was -- is -- an accepted part of family life (Burn)". Accordingly, his family regards poverty as an accepted part of family life, and as a result, do not fully comprehend the significance of Billingham's photos; "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 (ArtSeenSOHO)". Yet there is an unmistakable affection for his subjects, despite such an apparent emotional distance: as noted by Richard Cork, the judge of the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (which was awarded to Billingham in 1997)", [Billingham's] shocking frankness is seasoned with love as well". Such a dichotomy is inherent in the medium of photography itself, a notion inseparable from Billingham's work, and acutely explicated by Lewis: "photography is automatically exploitative of its subjects", yet it can be agreed that "we take pictures of the things we adore". Thus, Billingham shows his love for his family simply by exploiting them as subjects. Conversely, just as Billingham seems distant despite his love for his family, so does his family seem distant towards him.

In only a few of his photographs do his subjects even seem to be aware of his presence, which perhaps can be considered reflective of a family dynamic wherein the members are continually off-guard by nature of their relation... However, considering the size of the rooms and the ruthless flash of Billingham's camera, this oblivion remains a notable quality. Additionally, a considerable number of the prints are spontaneous shots (including one of Jason pegging Ray in the head with a tennis ball, and another of Ray throwing one of the cats across the living room) which would lead one to believe that "Billingham simply sat in his living room and waited, camera in hand, for something to happen, and while it says something about his parents' oblivion that they act like he's not there, it says something even stronger about his own self-imposed emotional distance (Lewis)". I've always been fond of conflict in art, and it is this underlying constant of contradiction in Richard Billingham's work that I find so appealing; primarily the limbo between distance and closeness, which I believe is what makes Billingham's work so unique.

While artists like Nan Goldin and Walker Evans have executed similar intimate portraits of rather eccentric individuals (and I must confess I am not terribly familiar with the entire breadth of either artist's work, and whatever judgments I make regarding must be considered accordingly) it seems that their photographs lack the spontaneity and honesty that I find in Billingham's photographs. I suspect this may be due to the form of the photograph itself, rather than the content: Goldin's photographs are consistently "good photography.".. the classical lighting and composition makes them appear staged, though her work has been praised for its realism (Although for me, the content does play a part... perhaps I am more conservative than others, but I don't often find myself casually in a room with a masturbating friend). One photograph which I believe to be an effective representation of Billingham's style is a print of Liz sitting on the living room sofa, working on a jigsaw puzzle. This image, though photographed in Billingham's previously mentioned disregard of "professional" techniques, remains a testimony to Billingham's skillful eye. The composition is sophisticated, with a concentration on color, pattern and texture. The chaos of colors of Liz's floral-printed moo moo follows down to the colorful tattoos on her forearms, and further to the confetti of puzzles pieces laying in her lap and sprawled out upon the table.

This disorder seems to reflect the chaos of life in the Billingham household; its liveliness, its violence, its humor, its disarray -- its messiness. The vibrant colors inspire a sort of radiance and happiness, which charmingly contrast against the considerably darker image of an obese woman, almost pathetically killing time by laboring over those tiny colored cardboard shapes. This contrast, between the mirthful and depressing, is also present in Billingham's print of the dog licking crumbs off the linoleum -- it is a comical image; the absurd crop, Liz's mangy fluffy white slippers, the wide-eyed dog seemingly attempting to squeeze his nose under the refrigerator to lap up whatever assortment of dirt and hardened morsels lie there -- and this comedy inspires a fondness for the subjects in the viewer, as is the nature of comedic characters and their relationship with the audience. Yet the situation, the fact that the dog has resorted to licking crumbs off the floor, is really quite pitiable, and in being pitiable, becomes exploitative.

As stated by Lewis, "What makes some photographs great is precisely the balance they strike between devouring their subject and adoring it, and the surprise they inspire at the idea that whatever they " re picturing can bear the weight of just that contradiction (Lewis)". Such is undoubtedly the case in Ray's a Laugh. As described by Burn, "It is a brilliant essay on the psychopathology of family life which is brave enough to suggest that destitution -- more: squalor and degradation -- can produce images that are not only not ugly, but actually galvanizing and beautiful.".