Polaroid 600 Film

It is quite ironic then that the next major public venue for Billingham’s work was the controversial show Sensation; Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection in 1997. This group exhibition was likely truly responsible for establishing Richard Billingham’s place in the British art scene and launching his international career, with concurrent solo shows inNewYork, Los Angeles, and Paris. His first major commissioned work came the following year from Artangel (London) in conjunction with the British Broadcasting Corporation. For this assignment Billingham produced Fishtank (1998), a 45-minute film comprised of Hi-8 video footage. Rather than a narrative, the piece functions more as a cinematic vignette of the artist’s series of family photographs, depicting everyday actions such as Ray feeding the goldfish or Liz playing with her pets.

Fishtank aired to mixed reviews on BBC2 in December 1998. Again, the arguments for and against the power of Billingham’s out-of-focus family scenes revolved around the question ‘‘is this art or social commentary?’’ Critics suggested it was difficult for an audience to understand the film because there is no voiceover or introductory narration; a criticism which echoed earlier claims that Billingham’s photographs were difficult to understand because they were not captioned like traditional documentary images. Was the artist seriously challenging his audience or merely exploiting his own family and their miserable living conditions? Billingham later made other films in this vein; Playstation (1999) features a close-up of his brother hands while playing a video game. His nail-bitten fingers dart over the controls of the game in a mundane, repetitive, yet mesmerizing fashion.

Billingham received further critical attention in 2001 when he was nominated for the Turner Prize, a prestigious annual award given by the Tate Gallery to a British artist for a significant body of work. Billingham was shortlisted on the strength of his major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (2000), which featured his now infamous series of family-based photographs and videos. Although he did not win the prize, he was a notable candidate because it was rare for a photographer to even be nominated. Since then Billingham’s more recent work has engaged concerns of landscape aesthetic. Even though he has photographed landscapes since the early 1990s, this component of his work has been largely overshadowed by the controversial family pictures.

Billingham’s series of untitled landscapes from 1992–1997 depict semi-urban places; odd forgettable spaces located between rural land and housing estates. But these places were not forgotten by Billingham, who associates these mundane landscapes of derelict playground areas and grassy industrial wastelands with the rites of passage of his boyhood. By contrast, landscape images included in the exhibition New Pictures (2003) at Anthony Reynolds Gallery introduced a new perspective of Billingham’s longstanding yet overlooked interest in beau-ty and nature. Experimenting with using a medium format camera for the first time, the new photographs depict various natural landscapes where the artist’s emphasis is about experiencing a place for the first time, rather than documenting a specific or personal space. Formal concerns of pattern, texture, and space override any apparent social comment Billingham may wish to convey, and this new work is obviously a concerted effort by a young artist trying to expand his range in style and technique.

Richard Billingham does not consider himself strictly a photographer. He began taking snapshot photographs as part of a wider effort to gather preparatory source materials for his paintings when he started his degree in fine art at the University of Sunderland in 1991. Over the course of the next five years, using a simple auto-exposure camera and cheap film, Billingham photographed his family in their council flat home in the Midlands of England. The resulting color images are garish in technique and content. They seem to break all the classic formal rules of photography and suggest amateurism; many images are out of focus, overexposed, haphazardly framed, or display an extremely grainy print quality. But Billingham’s candid portraits of his parents, Ray and Liz, his brother Jason, and various family pets, are an intimate and unapologetic depiction of the artist’s working class home life. Their amateurism can perhaps be overlooked in light of their honesty.

In this collection of photographs, distressing images of addiction and violence are juxtaposed with captured moments of comedy and tender affection. Ray’s alcoholism is a consistent theme. Billingham’s grey-haired, gaunt, middle-aged father is pictured in various states of sobriety; falling over, seated next to a vomit-spattered toilet, tucked up in bed with the covers to his chin, or just staring back at the camera through vague, uncertain eyes. Billingham captures his mother’s expressive range also. Liz, a large rounded woman with vibrant tattooed arms, is pictured vehemently arguing with Ray, and then joyfully cuddling a tiny kitten. Her presence is felt throughout the home as various feminine knickknacks decorate the grubby walls and furniture of the flat.

Initially Billingham’s photographs of his family were not intended for exhibition or to form a cohesive series, and most still remain untitled. But a selection of images was first publicly shown in 1994 in Who’s Looking at the Family? at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and from there, Billingham’s career quickly flourished. By 1995 his work was being represented by Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London and his first book of photographs, Ray’s a Laugh, was published in 1996. Overnight the book brought him notoriety and critical acclaim as critics were at odds about the photographs. Admirers applauded his snapshot aesthetic and the vernacular quality of the spontaneous images. They commended his critique of traditional social documentary practices by using gaudy color and avoiding a customary discreet or impartial distance from his subject. In this respect Billingham’s work was likened to that of other contemporary British photographers, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington. But other critics accused Billingham of sensationalism. Their polemic revolved around moral questioning and the notion that the work irresponsibly commodified the private reality of the artist’s family, providing spectacle for the popular entertainment of others in the style of a reality television show.