Shirin Neshat
Richard Billingham
Richard Billingham was born in 1970 in Birmingham. He is an acclaimed English photographer, artist, film maker and art teacher. His work mostly centres around is childhood; his relations with his family and the setting of the west midlands, resulting in his first feature film Ray and Liz. He was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner Prize and has had numerous successful exhibitions.
He picked up the camera and turned it on his dysfunctional family when he was a child living in a council flat. A tutor on Billingham’s art degree course at Sunderland University found the photos and consequently they were presented for the public. Billingham called them “Ray’s a laugh” and they provided an almost tragic-comic look into the poverty of Britain.
The tattoos, the lavishly decorated wall, the loose-fitting clothes, the tv dinners all paint quite a tragic setting, which in a different setting could almost be considered humorous.
When his parents died, they had no idea they had generated a Turner prize nomination or his bafta award winning film, which he had to use a campaign for to get off the ground
His brother Jason often says that “statistically, we should either be in prison or dead or homeless” because of their childhood. He reckons he is not because of David Attenborough documentaries.
He says he does feel a little guilt that he didn’t do more for his brother, but Jason has a stable job mapping motorway puddles and earns a good living, and when he went to see Ray and Liz Jason found it funny, he laughed amongst the other audiences tears.
He has now started taking pictures of the homeless:
I was interested by how the people on the streets have their own social life that runs in parallel to ours, but completely separate,” he says. “I get talking to them and you get a glimpse of the way they see us, from low down. Like a child’s perspective.”
I watched Ray and Liz and was immediately shocked at what I was seeing. The abusive mother and the alcoholic father created a setting so strange and alienating to me it was almost hard to watch. From Jason being left with a knife to the mother’s numerous tatoos the movie provided an insight into his poverty-stricken childhood. It was also beautifully shot, every frame seemed to be positioned in a visually appealing way; even the simple act of opening a window was interesting was shot with care. He had positioned the angle slightly lower so as to see the pattern of the rain hit, and then fall in patterns against the glass. It was with a morbid curiosity that I ended the film. My main worry was that one of the two children would befall some harm, and as it was based on real events it was almost a thriller at some points. How his brother, Jason, could watch this movie and laugh was beyond me.
Inspired by Billingham, I decided to take some primary source pictures of my own family on the following pages. They will be slightly satirical and will have some of the same colour pallet as some of Billingham’s darker “Ray’s a laugh work. Like that series, I will attempt to capture the spirit of my household, although in no way is it similar to Billingham’s dysfunctional, poverty-stricken family.
Accompanying these photographs are the satirical annotations linked below:
After I had taken the photos, I realised I had a large magnitude of yet more photos of my family in my camera roll from over the years. Whilst there was some objection to me putting old family photos that currently resign on the fridge door or proudly presented on the mantlepiece I only had to go back 3 months or so to find these gems which again represents the insanity of it all. The single line drawing was completed quickly and is
simple in design, yet works well. I liked it’s simplicity and cartoonish nature that’s created and will use it in my final piece
I realised some fo the ensemble family photos I had created were similar to the Anzeri's piece below, with one main difference - the formality that accompanied the time period. The old picture featured in his work, contrast to the modern and casual, almost colloquial tone of my photographs. Following this train of thought, I edited the photos above to make them feel like they were taken in the past, with low saturation and contrast that an old faded photo would have, and blurred edges where the camera would not have fully focused.
These edited photos combine a casual informal family picture with an aged quality that exists through Anzeri's work. I initially researched Billingham as a tool to create more dynamic caricatures, however I never considered I would create caricatures through the photographs. My most successful experiments were with a needle and thread, and looking ahead, I see a possibility for sewing on top of these photographs. I hope to complete a larger piece to resolve all my ideas so far, and I can see sewing on top of these altered photographs being a large part of that. It would bring forward themes from Anzeri, Billingham, and Morten and it would be interesting to see what impact this had and what sort of impact it had.
