Untitled (NRAL 38)

Richard Billingham became well known for his uncompromising photographic account of his family in the English town of Birmingham. The cheaply made, untitled photographs focus solely on his parents’ apartment, where Billingham’s alcoholic father Ray, his mother Liz, and his brother Jason live. The brutal honesty of the photographs sums up the misery of a family marked by unemployment and poverty, but also shows moments of relative happiness, images that equally repel and impress us with their visual attraction and painterly qualities. The ambivalent position of the artist between that of an observer and someone personally involved, distance and intimacy, generates a perspective that breaks all conventions in the realm of family photography, forcing us as beholders into a field of tension between voyeurism and sympathy, thematic positioning, and aesthetic perception.