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Kitchen Sink Poetics Celebrated British photographer Richard Billingham moves to moving image with first feature Ray & Liz, and its portrait of his own unruly family is as meticulously framed and bursting with detail as his stills. We discuss memory, influences and class
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ichard Billingham shot to fame in 1996 with the photobook Ray’s a Laugh. An unflinching portrait of his alcoholic father, Billingham’s photographs were hailed as a highly personal document of working-class identity. Now, almost 25 years later, he’s returned to the Black Country with Ray & Liz, a film about growing up as the heavy industry that once dominated the region was being decimated by Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies.
“I didn’t sit down one day and decide to make a film about my family,” explains Billingham while discussing the origins of his debut feature. “The film came from an idea I had for a gallery piece that charted a few days in my father’s life. The moments in the film where you see Ray drinking his homebrew, those are from that original concept. However, as I was shooting these scenes I decided I wanted to write a short film about my uncle, and then I wrote another one about my brother. The structure just emerged organically from there.” These scenes of Ray slipping in and out of an alcoholic daze provide Billingham with the framework to revisit two formative moments in his life. The first, dated around 1980, shortly after Ray had been laid off from his job as a machinist, centres on the time his baby brother Jason was left in the care of his uncle
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Interview: Patrick Gamble Lawrence. Billingham’s family later sold this house and moved into a nearby council flat. This is where the second chapter unfolds, in which a teenage Jason is seen fending for himself in the days leading up to him being taken into care Billingham’s ability to communicate his lived experience through his mise-en-scène illustrates a rarely seen aspect of working-class life. Blending various textures, patterns and objects, he has created a deeply personal memoir that eschews melodrama in favour of the type of photographic detail he’s famous for. The result is an arresting vision of urban hardship that’s unique in its understanding of the link between household objects and memory. “When you’re a kid you look at things so intensely,” he explains. “For example: you might sit and stare at the electric fire for half an hour, or at a >>