“First published in 1996 to enormous acclaim, Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh is one of the most significant photobooks of the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a cornerstone work of the Young British Artists generation. Formed of starkly intimate images of Billingham’s often chaotic parental home under the heavy effects of alcoholism and poverty, the book was produced in the 1990s with editors Michael Collins and Julian Germain. This new edition restores Billingham’s original vision for his deeply personal work for the first time. Including numerous unseen images and a distinct approach to sequencing inflected by Billingham’s training as a painter: it constitutes a ‘director’s cut’ and reintroduces a vital and consistently challenging work for a new era.” MACK website.
This is a new edition published February 2024 by Mack Books of Richard Billingham’s Ray’s A Laugh. I first came across one of his pictures about 10 years ago, when it was part of an exhibition at Tate Britain. I did not know the picture, nor the photographer, at the time. I was at Tate Britain looking for pictures for a project I was doing on a summer documentary course. I took a picture of the image, trying to do a witty juxtaposition (not very successfully) and when I showed my picture to the tutor, he remarked that she looked fierce and asked me who the photographer was. I told him I didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention that. I didn’t know it then but I missed a great opportunity to get to know Richard Billingham’s work.
The picture I saw in Tate Britain, by Richard Billingham.
This summary from the Guardian conveys the necessary information in a masterfully compact paragraph (better than anything I can do):
“It is just about 30 years since Richard Billingham picked up a camera and focused it on his alcoholic father, Ray, and his violent mother, Liz, and the Black Country council flat in which they lived. The pictures were intended as studies for paintings, but they took on a life of their own. A tutor on Billingham’s art degree course at Sunderland University came across the photographs in a plastic bag and Billingham ended up displaying them in all their flash-lit squalor: toothless and shirtless Ray cradling pop bottles of home brew; Liz, with her lavishly tattooed slabs of arms and vast floral print frocks, lost in her jigsaw puzzles or TV dinners.”
What’s in the book?
The photographs were a mixture of black and white, and colour, many of them with flash, which emphasises the harsh reality. The sequencing is first class, bringing the reader along in a fairly pacy manner, interspersed with moments of quietness with the use of still lifes of mundane objects in the flat - a battered-looking Dimplex electric heater, plastic flowers on a window sill. There were pictures of solitary birds in a park or reserve, which serves as section markers or a deliberate chance to pause and reflect on the rawness of the pictures of Ray and Liz.
Though the book is said to have invented a genre called “squalid realism”, it is not one long unremitting look at the squalid reality of alcoholism and poverty. There are pictures of tender moments between Ray and Liz - one where they embrace each other and another of them kissing. There are ones taken from the seventh floor flat of the surrounding area, which exudes (perhaps falsely) a sense of serenity. One even has a rainbow in it.
The only other person featured in the book is Jason, Richard Billingham’s younger brother. Jason experienced the worst fallout of Ray and Liz’s dereliction, as the Guardian puts it. Jason was taken into foster care when he was seven or eight after he went missing for a few days without Ray or Liz noticing. When he was older, he moved back in with Ray and Liz and the pictures were mostly from that time.
The original publication had as its cover picture the one with Ray’s blurred head, mouth opened in a laugh, on a red background and I will probably always associate this cover with the book.
The only text in this Mack edition is what you see on the cover and the spine. There is no text anywhere inside, not even a colophon or ISBN bar code. This is very unusual. I understand that the original only had a very short statement of text by Richard Billingham, and that he believed the pictures should and could speak for themselves.
The original earned Richard Billingham a Turner prize nomination and enormous acclaim. It deserves to be made available to a new audience and this new edition certainly does that. Get a copy now!
Purchase Ray’s A Laugh. (I am not affiliated and do not receive anything).
Documentary and Film
If you want to see real live footage of Ray and Liz (after reading the book first), there was a 1998 BBC2 documentary, commissioned by Adam Curtis, called Fishtank.
Richard Billingham has also made a three-part film called Ray & Liz. See a trailer for the first part here.
Articles and interviews
These two pieces in the Guardian are well worth reading:
Richard Billingham: ‘I just hated growing up in that tower block’, 2016.
Richard Billingham: ‘Statistically, I should be in prison, dead or homeless’, 2019