One of the best-known photographs from Richard Billingham’s book Ray’s a Laugh shows his father, Ray, in their Black Country council flat mid-fall, caught between an armchair and the carpet, his head about to crash into a tray and a wooden picture frame. The first time I saw the picture I was struck by the eerie passivity of a drunk’s face. Ray shows no pre-emptive wince, no anticipation of pain. I was reminded of the shocking and sometimes beautiful way that an inebriated person’s body can collapse and fall through the air. This is partly why a drunk person is at greater risk of death from a blow or a fall. They lack tension. They have become an object, vulnerable to the whims of their surroundings.
Ray’s a Laugh was an instant success on its publication by Scalo Press in 1996. Billingham took the photographs while studying for an art foundation course in Birmingham, originally intending them as source material for paintings rather than artworks in and of themselves, as he tells it. When Billingham went on to do a fine art degree at the University of Sunderland, his tutor Julian Germain saw the photographs and recognised their promise as autonomous works. He showed them to his friend Michael Collins, who was then the picture editor of The Telegraph Magazine, and they helped Billingham publish them as a book.
The early images show Ray in black and white and, later, Billingham’s mother Liz, his brother Jason, family friends and relatives in colour. Ray was a chronic alcoholic. He had always been a drinker, and the habit had worsened after he was made redundant from the local engineering factory when Billingham was a child. Liz was not a drinker, but she smoked heavily and appeared to assuage the chaos and frustration of life with her husband through a strong affection for and identification with sentimental nicknacks and pets.
Jason, seven years Billingham’s junior, and described by his brother as a “dosser”, was taken into foster care aged 11. It was Jason who gave Billingham’s book its title, saying of their father: “Ray’s a laugh, but I wouldn’t like to be like him.” The work is now being reissued, comprising not only the images in the 1996 book but dozens more from the same period, using Billingham’s original vision for the sequencing in a kind of extended director’s cut.
Billingham began photographing his father during a period when his mother had moved to an adjacent tower block, unable to tolerate Ray’s alcoholism. In her absence, his life had emptied out even further. “He didn’t eat anything for about 18 months. He didn’t have a telly, he didn’t listen to the radio, he just looked out the window and drank,” Billingham said in an interview for the British Film Institute.
Billingham was interested in capturing the tragedy of this solitude, the airless days in which time-markers no longer seemed to matter, but he was also drawn to the aesthetic arrangement of his father’s body in its various states of collapse. The way he fell this way or that seemed like useful compositional references for the paintings that Billingham has always said were his primary ambition. When Germain, his tutor, had initially seen some of these early photos he had felt a sense of discomfort. “I had the impression that nothing was held back,” Germain recalls to Liz Jobey in an essay published in Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader, which accompanies the reissue, “that he was showing me something the vast majority of people would probably feel uncomfortable about in relation to their parents.”
This would be the first of many ethical queries levied at Billingham, who appears largely to have taken them in his stride. After Billingham’s 1997 show at Luhring Augustine in New York, the artist and writer Martha Rosler wrote of “his greatly enlarged instant-camera colour photos of his drunken father and brother and his rot-toothed mother in their sorry council-house flat”, claiming that “without a sense of the social, only the personal remains, and a look at the merely personal is an invitation to voyeurism”. Her distaste was both aesthetic and moral — not only were the images, in her view, ugly, but Billingham had failed to use their ugliness in support of an argument. And yet the absence of social commentary — that Billingham was not using the pictures to make a point — was what others loved and were fascinated by. The journalist Lynn Barber, in a profile of Billingham for The Observer in 2000, wrote: “I care passionately about the Billinghams, precisely because they are not presented as social problems but as riotously colourful individuals.”
That some viewers are unable to parse anything but tragedy in the photographs, while others comment first on the moments of light that burst through says something about how they have been consumed: as art or, depending on the view, as journalistic documentation. These are not happy lives, that goes without saying — their home is filthy, their horizons extremely limited, their bodies ravaged. There are, though, moments of joy and communion, as there are in any life. A picture of Liz feeding a newborn kitten with a dropper, a look of sheer, exuberant glee on her face. Another of Liz and Ray passionately embracing. Or Ray sitting with his arm around his dog with a look of something near calmness and pride on his face. Then there are the images of bodily breakdown: Ray openly bleeding after a fight with no attempt to stem it, or upright with a dazed expression next to a toilet encrusted with filth. It’s not that there are any images that contradict the general impression of bleakness, exactly. I think, rather, they are all so raw and abject that they convey pure, actual life, and the persistence of actual life is always heartening on some level, even if its specifics are unhappy.
When asked about the ethics of presenting his family as he did, Billingham was sanguine, almost as if confused by the question. That was what his parents were like, after all. It’s not as though he had cynically staged photographs of them to imply false narratives. He was telling a story, though. In an interview, he compared his vision for the series to a play. All narrative building involves creation of a sort, and his closeness to the people he photographed makes for an exhilarating and unapologetic subjectivity. He is not a journalist, after all, and where he considers himself to have failed, it is for producing images that could have been made by a journalist. In the 2000 interview with Barber, he described a photo of his parents eating side by side on the sofa, saying of it: “It looks like any hack photographer could have come in and taken this photograph — it doesn’t show you anything about the relationship I have with them.” When asked in an interview with Robert Yates in 1996 what his family made of the images, Billingham said he’d wondered if they would perhaps force new insight, reveal themselves to themselves. Instead, they laughed, saying, “Don’t we look odd?”
I came across Ray’s a Laugh while researching depictions of alcoholism for a character I was writing in my second novel. I have known many heavy drinkers, myself included, but have never been very close to a person with chronic, late-stage alcoholism. A relative of mine was as close as I had personally come, and that wasn’t especially near. Other family members, closer to the person by relation and in age, had been the ones to give what care was possible. I would only hear second-hand descriptions of the state of the living quarters, of the person’s refusal to hear criticism. I listened to various people who knew them in their long-ago past, of their charisma and beauty and humour, and then to the descriptions of the current detritus and ill health so accelerated it was scarcely health at all any more. Nothing was sustained or nourished; the ailing living corpse was simply being maintained, as it marched towards its demise.
I saw Billingham’s photographs and understood instantly the feeling that needed drawing: it was one of receding surroundings. The alcoholic’s world is slowly reduced from the moment they begin to need alcohol, and it continues to shrink as the need expands. Some alcoholics have the means to at least portray the idea of expansiveness. A wealthy drunk can more easily conceal their need, for a time, by shrouding it in the social frivolities in which drinking is normal and expected. They can go to restaurants and launches and drink beautiful ice-cold martinis. An impoverished drunk, on the other hand, lacks the artifice. They can only afford the units, not the pantomime of justification. In these cases, like that of my family member by the time I was aware of their addiction, the world becomes horribly whittled down to the small space in which they are drinking. I thought of this lately while taking care of a cat who doesn’t go outside. The cat is obsessed with food because food is the only narrative marker in its day. Time, for the alcoholic, is essentially formless except for the way that drink maps it. In a book of art writing published in 2009, Gordon Burn, another great British chronicler of working-class disintegration, likened Billingham’s interests to those of Raymond Carver, observing that both portrayed “an indoor world”. That was it for me: an indoor world. A world that is vanishingly thin and yet still contains all the variance and complexity of human life.
I have written about my family intermittently in articles and essays over the past 10 years, and when I give workshops and classes, people who would like to write memoir sometimes ask how I have managed to square it with them. Mine is an unsatisfactory response, but one I believe is the only honest one. My family happened to be the sort of people who tolerated my intrusions. They may not have always liked it but they understood it and never resented me for it in ways more significant than could be discussed and resolved. I think they know that my impulse to write about them is not compelled by a desire for cheap revelations or shock value, but by my need to understand them. I don’t always feel fully a part of my family and so I need to look at it from the outside, turn it around as an object in my mind to comprehend it better.
Members of my family have had their different ways of dealing with it, much as they are differently represented in my work. My parents read everything I write and have sometimes been dismayed by the way I present myself or my background. My brothers have never read my novels, nor many of my essays, which I was shocked and upset to learn earlier this year but ultimately understand.
It’s not a useful answer, because it’s pure luck. It reminds me, though, of what I think about the question of auto-fiction (autobiography that allows substantial creative intervention). When asked if auto-fiction is good, or worthwhile, as a form, the only answer I can provide is that when a good writer writes it, it’s worthwhile and when a bad one does, it isn’t. Can you involve your family in your art, expose them and still be in their lives? Well, you can if they’re like mine, and you may not be able to if they’re not. The author Karl Ove Knausgård famously revealed the detritus of his late father’s alcoholism in the first book of his My Struggle series, and was never forgiven by some members of his family.
The photographer Martin Parr described, in alarmingly cavalier phrasing, the people he photographed as the “objects I am using”. By coincidence, as I write this essay, I am also working on an audio documentary about the Irish playwright and novelist Brendan Behan, who once described the Irish people as “not my audience; they are my raw material”. Behan was another artist whose portrayal of his working-class surroundings was simultaneously marvelled at and recoiled from by its middle-class witnesses. He, too, showed people who, by tradition, should be rendered only as naive figures of tragedy as people possessed of actual, complex personhood, mired as they may be in poverty and misfortune and decay. Burn diagnosed Billingham as being in possession of Graham Greene’s “splinter of ice”, and there is no denying that the ability to reveal one’s family in this manner is not usual, but nor is it usual to be able to reveal a world with such totality, as Billingham does here. I am thinking about what it’s like to see an image of Ray’s back, sloped and soft and emerging painfully from bed and, a few pages later, another image of Jason’s back, young and tough but strained, veins popping as though braced for what is coming down the line.
The writer Andrew Solomon once described depression as a disease of privacy, adding that “the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison”. Alcoholism, too, is a disease of privacy. To show it is not disgraceful. To refuse to see it is disgraceful. To perceive its revelation as salacious is disgraceful. Ray’s a Laugh compels us to see what is not commonly seen, and that is the most we can ask of a work of art.
Megan Nolan’s latest novel “Ordinary Human Failings” is published by Jonathan Cape
“Ray’s a Laugh” and “Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader” is published by Mack
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