Richard Billingham

Although a different style of using family portraits, I thought it was important to add into my research the work of Richard Billingham.

'my father raymond is a chronic alcoholic.
he doesn't like going outside, my mother elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
she likes pets and things that are decorative.
they married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
my younger brother jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with ray and liz again.
recently he became a father.
'dad was some kind of mechanic, but he's always been an
alcoholic. it has just got worse over the years.
he gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
he drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation,
sold the house. then we moved to the council tower block,
where ray just sits in and drinks.
that's the thing about my dad, there's no subject he's interested
in, except drink.'

'it's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise,
be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it -
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.'

These photos have no consistent style and are very much individual photographs as they stand. On certain ones I love the sharp focus on 'less important' parts of the photo, and the rest is completely out of focus. And how the flash is used on others, completely contrasting the type of image, bringing out the colours and the detail is very sharp.

From the same book / series I scanned in these photos also;

Like my black and white holga pictures they capture certain places that are significant or that remind him of memories he has.