Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist who is known for creating a photobook which documents his parents life. The images in which he took were later published into a book called Rays a Laugh. The Book documented and portrayed the poverty and deprivation in which he grew up in.
To document his parents life using photographs, he did it over a period of six years. When capturing the images he couldn’t use a modern camera that was coming out at the time as his family was great for money, so the photographs he captured of his parents were taken with the cheapest film camera, which was a instamatic camera with a built in flash, he could find. This film that he used provided harsh colours and shadows and bad focusing.
In my opinion this added to the effect of his images as it doesn’t make them look all flash and set up, it made the images and the content of the images look as if they were just taken at random when something was going on with either his mother or his father.
Most of his images featuring his father were more or less the most interesting as his dad was an alcoholic and was most of the time hung over, meaning that he didn’t always get what was going on and the emotions of his father would be good to capture.
When Billingham was taking these images he thought himself as a painter and not a photographer, and the images he would take would be source material for his paintings that he would produce. Whilst shooting his parents and creating these images he never took great care of his equipment. His original intentions of these images were to study the human figure in a interior space.
Over the years of taking these images his parents grew to the fact that he could be snapping at anytime.
Over the years since his book publication he has had the images of his parents shown and displayed in galleries around the country. One of which being the Royal Academy of Arts in London during 1997.
