Critical Analysis of Richard Billingham's Photography
Critical Analysis of Richard Billingham's Photography
Richard Billingham has established himself as one of the quintessential British artists of the 1990’s. While in many respects, his aesthetic style remains distinctive from that of other young British artists, his work concerns issues often explored by his contemporaries. In this essay, I will discuss a selection of what I believe to be his most interesting and definative photographs, in addition to a comparison of Billingham’s work, ideology, and myth with those of principal yBa’s.
The son of an unemployed mechanic and an obese housewife, Richard Billingham was born in 1970 near Birmingham, England. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts in 1994 from the University of Sunderland, where as an undergraduate, he took the photographs that have become his best-known works.
These large, colorful, energetic and uniformly untitled prints were taken over a period of seven years and compiled into a photoessay entitled Ray’s a Laugh. These same images were included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including MoMA’s “New Photography” exhibition in 1996, and the infamous “Sensation” exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1997 and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999.
Originally intended to serve as studies for paintings, photographed with an ordinary auto-focus camera, and developed at the local drug store, Billingham did not consider himself much of a “photographer” and was largely unconcerned with the technical formality of photography: “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.”
Accordingly, this lax method has not gone unnoticed by Billingham’s critics: “Almost every rule of photography is badly broken: pictures are out of focus, over-exposed, printed with a grain so visible that the image beneath is almost completely obscured... on some very basic level, Billingham’s may well be the worst photographs I’ve ever seen professionally published, and never mind for now that they’re also some of the best.”
In this respect, Billingham differs greatly from many young British artists who exhibit near-obsessive technical prowess. For instance, Ron Mueck’s superrealistic sculptures, Jenny Saville’s mammoth nudes, and Mark Wallinger’s equine portraits all consistently “wow” their audience by technique alone, inviting the viewer to endlessly...