Photographic Realism: The Art of Richard Billingham 9781350108714, 1350108715

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PHOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

ii 

PHOTOGRAPHIC REALISM The Art of Richard Billingham

Kieran Cashell

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Kieran Cashell, 2023 Kieran Cashell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1995), copyright © the artist and courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery. Used with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.



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To my father, Patrick Cashell, 1945–2020

vi   

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  viii Abbreviations xi Acknowledgements xii

Introduction: Still pursuing the Real  1 1 A sociologist’s paradise: Early family studies (1990–4)  15 2 Prole art threat: Ray’s a Laugh (1996)  43 3 They fuck you up: Sensation | Fishtank (1997–8)  73 4 Outside 101 5 Enclosure: Zoo (2004–7)  133 6 Home: Recent cinematic work (2015–18)  161 Conclusion: Locating Billingham in the context of British neorealism: Memory realism and the paternal gaze  187 Notes  203 Bibliography  224 Filmography  236 Index  238

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE: The original photobook RAY’S A LAUGH (RAL) (1996) is unpaginated. In my numbering system I have distinguished the photographs from the pages and supplemented the ERRATA EDITION plate numbers in square brackets to disambiguate (i.e. EE: 2014). NRAL refers to photographs from the family cycle not published in Ray’s a Laugh (most of these are in the Saatchi collection). Actual photographs published in RAL date from 1990 to 1996. All images by Richard Billingham are copyright of the artist and courtesy of the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. They are reproduced with the kind permission of Richard Billingham and the Anthony Reynolds Gallery.

Plates   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990), RAL #17 [EE Plate 19] (1996) Walter R. Sickert, L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909) Richard Billingham, RAL #37 [EE Plate 37] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #16 [EE Plate 18] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #33 [EE Plate 33] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #3 [EE Plate 5] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #20 [EE Plate 22] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #42 [EE Plate 42] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #43 [EE Plate 43] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #54 [EE Plate 53] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #55 [EE Plate 53] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #32 [EE Plate 32] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #13 [EE Plate 15] (1996) Richard Billingham, RAL #22 [EE Plate 23] (1996) Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1996) Fishtank (1998) Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #10 (1997)

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #8 (2003) Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #11 (2003) Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #7 (2003) Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #5 (2003) Richard Billingham, (Norfolk) Dyke (2003) Richard Billingham, Cloud Break (2001) Richard Billingham, (Norfolk) Gates (2002/3) Richard Billingham, Norfolk Landscape (2002) Richard Billingham, Cows in the Rain (2003) J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise (1835–40) Richard Billingham, Sloth (2005) Richard Billingham, Mandrills (2005) Richard Billingham, Bear Pit (2006) Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (Dog) (1995) Richard Billingham, Zoo (Chimpanzee) (2006) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018) Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2

Richard Billingham, Triptych of Ray (1990)  18 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990), RAL #53 [EE Plate 52] (1996)  27 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990)  28 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990)  28 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990)  29 Walter R. Sickert, La Hollandaise (c. 1906)  33 Richard Billingham, RAL #2 [EE Plate 4] (1996)  53 Richard Billingham, RAL #27 [EE Plate 28] (1996)  57 Richard Billingham, RAL #52 [EE Plate 51] (1996)  57 Richard Billingham, RAL #11 [EE Plate 13] (1996)  61 Richard Billingham, RAL #25 [EE Plate 26] (1996)  61 Richard Billingham, RAL #45 [EE Plate 45] (1996)  62 Richard Billingham, RAL #35 [EE Plate 35] (1996)  63 Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1994)  81 Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker (1669–70)  84

illustrations   ix

3.3 Fishtank (1998). Dir. Richard Billingham  92 3.4 Fishtank (1998) (Ray and Liz)  92 3.5 Fishtank (1998) (snake)  99 NOTE: Illustrations of the Black Country series are numbered according to the collation of photographs in the Black Country Public publication (Billingham 2004), that is, ##1-26 (Day: 1997) and ##1-13 (Night: 2003) 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 7.1 7.2

Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #4 (1997)  106 Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #20 (1997)  106 Frank Hurley, The Endurance at Midwinter (1915)  113 Richard Billingham, Birds (Panoramic Landscape) (2008)  117 Richard Billingham, Muddy Path (2001)  121 John Constable, The White Horse (formerly A Scene on the River Stour) (1818–19)  127 Richard Billingham, Gorilla (2005), video projection (4m 9s) and Tapir (2005) (1m 32s). Zoo, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2007)  139 Richard Billingham, Panda (2005)  145 Richard Billingham, Orangutan (2006)  146 Richard Billingham, Polar Bear (2001–6)  147 Richard Billingham, Untitled (Elephant) (2006)  150 Richard Billingham, Tapir (2005). Single-screen video installation for monitor (1m 32s), dimensions variable  154 Ray & Liz, directed by Richard Billingham (2018)  162 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  162 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  163 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  163 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  170 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  174 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  175 Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (2018)  182 Richard Billingham, Jason, Walter and Ray (2006)  200 Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1995)  201

x   illustrations

ABBREVIATIONS

EE Richard Billingham Ray’s a Laugh, New York: Errata Editions, 2004 RAL Ray’s a Laugh, Richard Billingham, Zurich: Scalo, 1996 NRAL Not Ray’s a Laugh: images from Richard Billingham’s family cycle, circa

1992–7 in the Saatchi collection not printed in Ray’s a Laugh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

his book is based on extensive research, interviews and previously published accounts, and it would be fulsome to acknowledge everyone who assisted in its conception and evolution. It is, however, necessary to identify key people who went out of their way to help at various stages of the process. First and foremost, I am very grateful to Richard Billingham for his generosity, honesty and frankness in providing me with the crucial empirical information that buttresses this work, and for addressing what must have sometimes seemed over-detailed and invasive inquiries. His encouragement when I first proposed the project and support throughout were vitally important. Further thanks are due to him, and to Anthony Reynolds, for permission to reproduce examples of his work as illustrations in the text (although it ultimately proved impossible to include all the images I would have liked). Technological University of the Shannon (Midwest), Ireland provided financial assistance for the colour plate section without which the book would be an anaemic academic study. Thanks to Liam Brown for his assistance with this. Michael Collins, Julian Germain and Val Williams answered detailed questions which enabled me to imaginatively reconstruct the initial impact of the artist’s early photos. Jacqui Davies, producer of Ray & Liz, organized for me to view the film prior to general release – thanks to her for granting permission to reproduce the film stills in the text. Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal, allowed me to cannibalize an earlier article I published on Billingham’s short film Ray. Thanks to Philippa Brewster, to Lisa Goodrum, and to my editors at Bloomsbury, Louise Baird-Smith and Alexander Highfield, who backed the project and oversaw its realization. Closer to home, thanks to my mother, Anne Cashell, for her support (material and emotional) during the writing which coincided with a challenging time for our family, and on that more personal note, thanks to my sisters, Ailbhe and Triona, and to Sean and Catherine Toomey. Finally, to my own family, Rachel and Benjamin, I wish to express my gratitude and unconditional love not just for the duration of writing a book, but forever.

Every old man I see Reminds me of my father When he had fallen in love with death . . . —PATRICK KAVANAGH1

From the poem ‘Memory of My Father’, Collected Poems, copyright Estate of Patrick Kavanagh used with permission. 1

xiv



INTRODUCTION STILL PURSUING THE REAL

This book examines the work of Richard Billingham (1970–),1 one of the most intriguing and enigmatic figures to emerge from the Sensation generation of Young British Artists in the 1990s. Distinguished by a severe and uncompromising realism, his snapshots of family life in a West Midlands council estate flat exposed the residue of the British underclass at the turn of the century to stark and unambiguous scrutiny. Published in 1996 under the title Ray’s a Laugh with an endorsement by street-photographer Robert Frank,2 this body of work is now critically acclaimed as a landmark of contemporary visual culture, inviting contextualization with exponents of documentary photography and photojournalism such as Bill Brandt, Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Nancy Hellebrand, Paul Graham, Shirley Baker, Keith Pattison, Daniel Meadows, Don McCullin and Nick Waplington (Warren 2005: 131). Refracted through Billingham’s lens, however, this tradition is given a much more splenetic edge whereby stale social realist conventions are convulsed with a punk animus and fused with a post-documentary approach (understood as a rejection of the ‘poetic’ documentary movement’s condescending moralism). When shown in the controversial Sensation exhibition of the Saatchi collection at the Royal Academy in 1997, his work was transfigured into caustic provocation, as the upper-middle-class custodians of cultural heritage were confronted with the intimidatingly intimate image of the new ‘working-class poverty of 1990s Britain following the years of conservative government’ (Remes 2007b). The artist, however, responds cynically to this archetypical reading of his work. Criticizing the disproportionate attention such opinions tend to place on the ‘dysfunctional’ content of his photographs, he expresses surprise at the blindness of audiences to the formalism of contemporary photographic practice: ‘I thought everybody could read photographs, but they can’t’ (Billingham in Jackson 2001). The vast majority of viewers ‘only saw the surface of the images, such as my mum’s

tattoos or the carnivalesque wallpaper, or the type of knickknacks on display, or the dirt on the floor or whatever’, he adds: ‘It was like the audience was just leering at this other world’ (in Canning 2004; Gardner 2009: 55). Whereas his ‘parents and brother’ on the other hand ‘are very happy with [Ray’s a Laugh]’, he claimed at the time. ‘Neither I nor they (my parents and brother) are shocked by the directness.’ But, he added, that’s because ‘we’re all well-enough acquainted with having to live with poverty’ (in Tarantino 2000: 87). Motivated by the important autobiographical dimension of Billingham’s work, an extensive conversation with the artist (beginning 2013) has developed in preparation for this book. Articulated through several informal dialogues and exchanges, this conversation has been formalized (where necessary) into a series of structured interviews and focused discussions (pursuing lines of inquiry deriving from earlier talks or previously published interviews) that took place between April and June 2018. Enriching the exegesis of Billingham elaborated in the text, the purpose of this conversation is to interweave critical analysis with a dialogical subtext. This methodology should not be misconstrued as a naïve effort to authenticate the autobiographical aspects of Billingham’s oeuvre through confirming the artist’s intentionality; nor should it be perceived as an attempt to set limits to critique and interpretation. Rather, as Chris Townsend and Mandy Merck argue in their introduction to the Art of Tracey Emin (2002), the advantage of this dialogical approach is that it allows the artist to contribute meaningfully to the critical discourse, enabling a richer genre of contextual project to emerge that involves the artist’s participation in the mutual elaboration of ‘a closer, tougher form’ of evaluation, ‘recognising the value of critical discourse’ not just for their current profile or the social reception of their practice but to inform the articulation and subsequent direction of their aesthetic practice (Townsend and Merck 2002: 20). This dialogical approach is enabling precisely because it encodes the critical conversation with crucial experiential content, not in order to achieve a more authentic explanation of the work, but rather to identify and develop criteria relevant to its overall aesthetic and critical understanding.

The realist heritage Similar to American photographer Nan Goldin, it is tempting to identify Billingham’s Sensation aesthetic as the radicalization of realism for the postpunk generation.3 Yet the artist denies this association, insisting that his postdocumentary ‘squalid realism’ (Adams 2016) be affiliated with the genealogy of British painting, from Walter Sickert, and the Camden Town urban postimpressionist group (including Spenser Gore and Harold Gilman), through

2   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

the ‘proletarian’ vernacular of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters (Sylvester 1954: 62) of the late 1950s (such as Jack Smith and John Bratby),4 to the post-war London School of figurative painting (Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach) up to, and especially significant for Billingham’s generation, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Indeed, the catalogue essay for the Pursuit of the Real exhibition in Manchester in 1990 observes of the School of London that it ‘inherit[s] Sickert’s mantle’. Auerbach and Kossoff – even Freud and Bacon – are regarded as ‘painters of a . . . “real” in the sense that it . . . is private, like Sickert’s Camden Town, in the sense that its meaning stems from personal association’ (Causey 1990: 27). Exquisitely critiquing Bratby’s paintings as an ‘enthusiastic mess’, David Sylvester complains that the objects ‘piled up in them remain too much themselves, so that in conveying the anarchy of life they bring that anarchy with them’ (1954: 63). The sense of realism relevant to Billingham’s aesthetic is identified inadvertently here: in conveying the anarchy of existence, his photographs bring that anarchy with them. Around the time Ray’s a Laugh was being prepared for publication, photographer Julian Germain recalls a revealing conversation with the artist. ‘I can remember [Billingham]’, he says, ‘speaking about it being essential that there is a transformation of reality into art’. At the time, the young artist’s understanding of the transformative potential of art was informed by his reading of conservative critic Peter Fuller’s thesis of the aesthetic ‘reinvention of the physical world’. In a slightly later interview, this time referring explicitly to Fuller’s principle of ‘redemption through form’, Billingham re-emphasized the necessity of discovering artistic means to transfigure the banality of mundane reality in order to avoid tawdry sensationalism (in Lingwood 1998a: 56). Although Germain remembers that Billingham (then a very recent painting graduate) still ‘considered himself an aspiring painter, maybe at that point he felt he had to paint to make that transformation happen’ (Germain 2018), he was surprised nevertheless by Billingham’s identification of this (specifically, for him, painterly) objective of the redemptive force of pictorial realism in defence of his own circumstantial snapshot aesthetic. Things have changed since then,5 but the artist’s preoccupation with the aesthetic transvaluation of reality – paradoxically perhaps – remains inextricably linked with an uncompromising fidelity to observational reality: a fidelity informed by his enduring engagement with Sickert and the post-Sickertian school of British figurative painting (celebrated in Fuller’s critical writings). Incidentally, Fuller, in clarifying the concept of redemption through form, refers to Frank Auerbach in a way that suggests a vivid comparison with Billingham’s early convictions. Identifying Auerbach’s singular style as a kind of ‘existential realism’, Fuller develops a striking (if scatological) image of the painter sequestered in his Camden Town atelier, working on a ‘vision of the external world’. Originating

INTRODUCTION   3

in anguish yet suggestive of ‘glints and promises of redemption’, he imagines the process as that ‘of a man thrown in a cell and left with only his own excrement out of which to create a vision of freedom’ (Fuller 1986). This book is the first comprehensive examination of Richard Billingham and explores his art practice relative to the genealogy of British realism. Arranged in chronological order, each chapter focuses on a specific phase of the artist’s evolving practice, identifying Billingham’s distinctive aesthetic style as a form of photographic realism. Although rooted in the realist pictorial tradition, this category is intended to rhyme with the style of British social realist cinema. Yet Billingham is closer to the renascence of realist practices in 1990s screen culture than the classic realism associated with the 1960s Kitchen Sink film genre. From a critical viewpoint, certain neorealist films, especially Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) and Riff-Raff (1991), Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983) and Naked (1993), Alan Bleasdale’s television series Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), clearly provide powerful mutually enlightening frames of reference. The artist’s recent feature film Ray & Liz (which significantly elucidates his early work) shares similar ideological, sociological and anthropological – as well as autobiographical – concerns as the screen realism associated with the directors mentioned above (he identifies, for example, with their tragicomic sense of narrative). This book, however, concentrates on the structural affinities of Billingham’s photographic realism with British directors such as Terence Davies (especially his early trilogy of autobiographical films Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration [1976–1980–1983] and Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988]) and Gary Oldman (Nil by Mouth [1997]).6 In his pursuit of an authentic existential reality of personal association, Billingham represents the strongest contemporary inheritor of this rich and complex heritage of realism.

Richard Billingham: Realism, reality culture, and the Real Raised in the English West Midlands town of Cradley Heath, Billingham attended Bournville School of Art in Birmingham from 1990 to 1991, and later transferred to Sunderland University, where he graduated with a degree in painting in 1994. It was during this period that Julian Germain discovered the drugstore snapshots that Billingham was using as reference material for his paintings. Germain later collaborated with the artist and editorial photographer Michael Collins to sequence these photos into portfolios that ultimately led to the publication of Ray’s a Laugh in 1996. Before Billingham graduated from university, however, three large-scale black-and-white photographs were shown in the acclaimed exhibition Who’s Looking at the Family? at the Barbican Gallery in London.

4   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

Inclusion of enlarged versions of his family photographs in the zeitgeistcapturing Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy London in 1997 (travelling the following year to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, before concluding at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999) was a pivotal moment in Billingham’s career, bringing international attention and establishing him as a key protagonist of the paradigm shift in visual culture of the late 1990s. Now considered a historic event in the internationalization of British art, Sensation marked the moment at the cusp of the millennium when contemporary art from the UK penetrated global cultural consciousness, as a result of which Billingham became associated with an ‘informal’ transnational affiliation of artistphotographers ‘in pursuit of the snapshot verities of intimacy and spontaneity’ (Liebmann 2002: 120). With Nan Goldin at the vanguard, this group includes Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Rineke Dijkstra, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jack Pierson, David Armstrong and Shellburne Thurber (Liebmann 2002). In a critical essay published in the Sensation catalogue, Brooks Adams famously contextualized Billingham’s ‘belligerently candid pictures’ with reference to international figures like Goldin,7 such as Craigie Horsfield, Patrick Faigenbaum and Jeff Wall (Adams 1997: 39). Given this level of early recognition it seems quite anomalous that Billingham hasn’t received more critical attention (especially considering the disproportionate attention some of the other artists involved in Saatchi’s show have received). Saatchi’s exhibition has since entered history as a synecdoche of the pre-9/11 era of pre-millennial tension (Shone 1997; Fullerton 2016b),8 and this book takes the opportunity to critically re-examine the cultural impact of Sensation from the perspective of the curation of Billingham’s work in the show. To those who regard the photographs exhibited in Sensation (and published sans contextual commentary in Ray’s a Laugh) as engaging with the thenrecent phenomenon of reality television, the artist’s subsequent video-camera explorations of the private realm seem perhaps an inevitable progression (Remes 2007b). Billingham’s first significant experiment in moving-image realism, Fishtank (1998) is a 47-minute video commissioned by Artangel (London-based production company) as a short for television. Shot in his parents’ flat in the Cradley Heath council estate,9 this claustrophobic, hand-held (but methodically edited) footage takes the lumpen snapshot verité of the family photos to new and unprecedented levels of exposure. First broadcast on BBC2 in December 1998, the video was produced by Adam Curtis and James Lingwood. If critics were understandably anxious to distinguish Billingham’s practice from reality television (Remes 2007a; Engberg 2007), contemporary audiences – perhaps attracted by its post-documentary, direct-realist aspects (aspects associated with the confessional video and found-footage genres) – were inclined to identify Billingham’s videos with the hugely popular reality phenomenon (Warren 2005: 132). Incidentally, even if the first bona-fide reality-TV show, The Family – fly-onthe-wall slice-of-life documentary set in the Wilkins’s working-class family home

INTRODUCTION   5

in Reading – was broadcast by the BBC in the UK as early as 197410 (Jeffries 2006: 18–19), the passion for voyeuristic entertainment as we now know it was, arguably, awakened in its contemporary compulsive form sometime between the murder of James Bulger in 1993 and the first episode of televised social-experiment Big Brother on Channel 4 in 2000 (the Dutch paradigm-case programme which guttered out in 2018 to widespread audience tedium and plummeting ratings). During this period a new consumer demand arose for unscripted, raw, unedited and, in principle, endlessly prolonged documentary footage. Hours of inconsequential raw material, presented without guiding narrative continuity, dialogue management or structural control, were suddenly considered of high entertainment value. If it did not quite prefigure or anticipate this new direct-realist surveillance imperative, British visual culture in the 1990s became fascinated by the ‘reality’ phenomenon, and so originated the engagement with the unmediated – the confessional and the voyeuristic – what Stallabrass has identified as the ‘art-world prejudice for the straightforward depiction of the real’ (1999: 87).11 As mentioned, the high-profile murder of three-year-old James Bulger (by two 10-year-old boys) in Merseyside in 1993 can, arguably, be regarded as a kind of cultural marker of the beginning of this captivation with the unsupervised camera’s indiscriminate and unintentional surveillance of quotidian reality. The precarious CCTV image that circulated in the media during the trial, although made almost illegible by interference-grain and noise, contained enough data for the hauntingly impressionistic picture of a child, being led by the hand out of the Bootle New Strand shopping centre to his imminent death. This visuo-historical signifier coupled with Princess Diana’s infamous confessional Panorama interview (with Martin Bashir) broadcast on BBC 1 in 1995 where the regal voice was heard softly exposing the ugly truth of the sovereign marriage can perhaps provide some explanatory cultural indexes for the emergence of this pre-millennium obsession with the culture of exposure, visual surveillance technology and the voyeuristic constitution of the real. Although inspired by a compatible enthusiasm for the indiscriminate recording of mundane existence (‘The best footage seems to work when I’m just looking and forget that I’m filming’12) Billingham’s home-videos stem from a different impulse. Like Jack Smith (one of the painters of the Kitchen Sink school of British painting) who ‘denied any intention beyond reflecting the environment in which he lived’ (Causey 1990: 24), Billingham’s realist experiments are identified as having an equivalent interest in the examination of his immediate environment and therefore ought to be distinguished from the voyeuristic-confessional vogue. ‘Beyond political or voyeuristic aspirations, by photographing his family, Billingham discovers himself ’ (Remes 2007b). While it remains important to acknowledge its complex relationship with ‘post-documentary’ reality culture, it is nevertheless mistaken to identify Billingham’s video work as an effort to embrace the contemporary addiction to endlessly protracted footage of everyday life or,

6   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

more sinisterly, commercially inspired quasi-Milgram-type social-experiment documentaries contrived to appear unscripted and unrehearsed when in fact they are the strategic product of high-tech editing and ‘deposited manipulated narratives’ (Engberg 2007). In this book Billingham’s artistic motivation is distinguished from the voyeuristic-confessional culture industrial norm by demonstrating how his photographic aesthetic originates in original attempts to apply the methods of Camden Town empiricism to the exploration of his immediate domestic situation. (Note, for example, the low-keyed consonance between the video piece Ray in Bed [1999] and Sickert’s painting Nuit d’ete [1906].) It is hardly necessary to observe that Billingham’s experimental camcorder realism importantly predates the new-genre realism of ‘reality’ TV (and can even be considered to anticipate the phenomenon as the first episode of the most notoriously successful reality show in the UK, Big Brother, was broadcast on Channel 4 two years after the release of Fishtank) yet, despite this caveat, his photographic realism shall be characterized as involving a complex exposure to the real through a lens that acknowledges that the conventions of realism, as Samantha Lay observes, are, along with the concept of the real itself, continuously evolving: In recent years so-called ‘Reality TV’ has had an impact on documentary form and has also influenced other areas of visual culture and one might consider diverse projects ranging from Tracey Emin’s bed, to The Blair Witch Project (1999) as examples since they all engage directly with ‘the real’ and the personal in different ways. (LAY 2002: 121)

Acknowledging the impossibility of predicting how the tradition of social realism in British screen culture will develop – and to what extent the phenomenon of reality television will ‘impact’ the realist film ‘text’ – Lay does however suggest that the current existential ‘trend toward the personal and private’ seems likely to continue. And, ‘At the very least’, she admits, ‘Reality TV may make gritty social realism as we have come to know it along with all its conventions look stilted and “unrealistic”’ (Lay 2002: 122). Certainly, Billingham’s interest in amateur handheld camera practice shares aspects of this direct-realist, ‘gritty’ found-footage style, but his realism is motivated by the pursuit of existential truth rather than influenced by stylized post-documentary reality-TV culture. Since the late 1990s, Billingham’s practice has expanded to embrace the intersection of space and place, elaborating a subtle interrogation of how topographical frontiers can evoke an ambivalent sense of belonging while stimulating the instinct to escape. Black Country (1997) – the series of photographs of Cradley Heath (the town in the West Midlands where the artist grew up) – is strangely reminiscent of Atget’s haunting photographs of the empty streets of

INTRODUCTION   7

fin-de-siècle Paris. For the first time, attention in this work is focused outside the claustrophobic confines of the domestic sphere and towards the (weirdly no less claustrophobic) ‘sites of absence’ of Billingham’s humdrum hometown. Indeed, in the interplay of absence and presence associated with this work, a narrative of escape is strongly implied. Describing himself as a ‘product of neglect’, Billingham admits that he regarded education as a means of escaping from his social circumstances (2018). Although the risk involved in this social mobilization was massively outweighed, he says, by the risk of staying put, in a way, a part of him has remained and will always remain in the West Midlands town of his childhood. In 2003, in response to a commission from Birmingham Arts Centre VIVID, the artist (having settled in Brighton) returned to Cradley Heath to complete a series of directorial photographic night-tableaux of the same dead-zone locations. The fascinating Ulysses-like interaction between day-time and night-time scenes complements the peripatetic tensions between absence and presence that haunt these spectral exterior studies. The eerie, empty townscape seems almost postapocalyptic under the unsupervised vacancy of Billingham’s time-lapse lens. In this series, due perhaps to the subsequent photobook’s Blakean contrasts (between the 1997 diurnal scenes and the 2003 nocturnal exposures), the artist’s nostalgic ambivalence is inadvertently transferred to the content, mapping a psycho-social conflict (between sense of belonging and emancipation) that strongly pervades the project. Billingham often identifies himself as a ‘landscape photographer’13 or as an ‘artist of place’14 and in his landscape photography, the artist uses the camera not primarily as a medium of representation but rather, as Juliana Engberg says, as a means ‘to interpret space [and] place’ (2007). Later images of the British countryside witness the extension of this process such that the lens becomes an active means of exploring both topographical and phenomenological space. The key to Billingham’s enigmatic and eerily beautiful images of the British countryside is the superimposition of the image of landscape in the geographical sense (the exterior environment cultivated as a ‘view’) and the image of landscape in the pictorial sense (a space of depiction with a distinct iconographical and rhetorical history). ‘Here’, as philosopher Wilfred Sellars suggests (admittedly in a different context), ‘the most appropriate analogy is stereoscopic vision, where two differing perspectives on a landscape are fused into one coherent experience’ (in O’Shea 2007: 11). Billingham’s photographs of the Norfolk Fen, the South Downs, Constable Country and the Burren in the West coast of Ireland, for instance, uncannily reminiscent of half-remembered generic paintings, seem located at the precise point where these disjunctive, incompatible ‘images’,15 fundamental to the ideology of landscape, overlap and intersect. The result is a weird kind of stereoscopic ‘alienation effect’ whereby the pictorial image of landscape (the pastoral, Romanticist Picturesque heritage, associated with the category of the sublime and its cognates) is overlain with the photographic image of a manifest

8   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

physical terrain and subtly altered such that the opacity of the aesthetic tradition (the replication of compositional memes) significantly others the unmediated (away-from-the-lens) landscape. Such alienation effects, I argue, are essential to the formal innovation of Billingham’s anti-Romanticist and subtly de-sublimated flat landscape images which, however serene they may appear, seem agitated by an eerie and subliminal tension. The phenomenological effort to ‘become the landscape’ (Sylvester in Causey 1990: 26) is continually obstructed in Billingham’s work by a subterranean uneasiness that ultimately manifests an unconscious expression of estrangement from the landscapes he photographs which, through his lens, seem almost impossibly distant, as if constantly referring (back) to a past that can never be completely escaped. Sometimes Billingham’s reputation as a quintessentially Kitchen Sink British artist (Adams 1997; Brady 2019) obscures the fact that he has acquired a significant international profile. Widely travelled in Europe, the Middle East and America, Billingham has completed residencies at the British School in Rome and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and, since the late 1990s, has exhibited extensively and regularly throughout the United States and Continental Europe. His photographic portfolio includes stunning images made in Ethiopia, Pakistan and South America. One of the first themed exhibitions to include his work was Life/Live in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1996. But his most international and ambitious project to date, arguably, is Zoo (2004–7), the series of photographic and video studies made in zoos around the world documenting the demoralizing behaviour of wild animals in confinement. ‘Around that time’, Billingham says, ‘I was doing a lot of travelling to various cities because of different shows I was having. Whenever there was a zoo in one of those cities, I would go to it to make work – staying an extra couple of days if need be’ (Billingham 2008: 59). The animal in Polar Bear (video, 2005) moves repeatedly in and out of its pen, the sensation of confinement intensified as it continually disappears and reappears in the frame of the ‘static camera’. Replicating the limits of the enclosure containing the live creature, Billingham comments, ‘I found that by using a video camera and a tripod, I could record the movement of the animal much better, especially repetitive movement’ (Billingham 2008: 58). What interests the artist in this series is clearly the compulsive behaviour of the subjects, the fact that animals in captivity resort to meaningless repetitious activity; as a result, this project, interestingly, features Billingham’s most post-documentary ‘reality’ work. The videos of Zoo, that is, pursue forms of voyeuristic surveillance (and morbid disclosure) associated with reality-culture’s indiscriminate recording and unsupervised camera: ‘I could just leave the camera run,’ Billingham told me. ‘Sometimes for forty minutes . . . or until the battery ran out. In the wild, you could never achieve that’ (Billingham 2018 [5]).

INTRODUCTION   9

The sense of the real pursued in Zoo, however, is closer to the traumatic encounter with ‘the Real’ as discussed by Slavoj Žižek in his psychoanalytic study of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s celebrated film Three Colours: Blue (1993) (2001: 176). Following the motor accident at the beginning of Blue in which Julie’s husband and child are killed, Juliette Binoche’s character, Žižek writes, discovers herself ‘deprived of the fantasy’s protective shield, which means she is directly confronted with the raw Real’. Apropos of the concluding scene of the film in which the protective shield is symbolically re-established in the window frame through which Julie’s crying face is transparently seen, Žižek is adamant, Blue is not ‘about the slow process of regaining the ability to confront reality, to immerse oneself in social life, but rather a film about building a protective screen between the subject and the raw real’ (2001: 176). ‘This’, according to Tom McCarthy in an article on the distinction between realist representation and the experience of the Real, evokes a sense of reality that happens ‘or forever threatens to happen, not as a result of the artist “getting it right” or being authentic’, but rather a Real that takes place as a violent irruption through the pictorial framework. The traumatic Real in this sense occurs as a piece of ontological excess, McCarthy suggests, that cannot be accommodated to the work’s representational regime yet somehow insinuates itself – protruding through it. To exemplify this concept, McCarthy invokes Michael Leiris’s metaphor of a bullfight: the phenomenon of the traumatic real here is ‘the tip of the bull’s horn’, he suggests. ‘Think about it: if a matador is gored, the bullfight, the entire spectacle, suddenly comes to an appalled halt; what the bull’s horn brings to the party is not just danger, but also the possibility that the party itself could be catastrophically interrupted’ (2014: 22). A contemporary review of Billingham’s zoological project observed that the suffering of the animals, while obviously not ‘caused by the production of these videos’, was nevertheless unequivocally ‘framed by the camera’ (Hansen 2007a: 31). And it is precisely the suffering of the animal in the enclosure of the screen that shows itself, like the tip of an animal’s horn, protruding – awkwardly and dangerously – through the videos (and later black and white snapshots) of Zoo.

Post-documentary social realism and Billingham as auteur One of the central contributions of this book is its discussion of Billingham’s latest cinematic post-documentary projects, specifically, the film installation Ray (thirty-minute short premiered at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea in 2015) and, more significantly, the fully realized feature-length movie Ray & Liz (2018) which went on general release in March 2019. What is interesting about this

10   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

recent transition to film is that it coincides with a return to the autobiographical themes that preoccupied Billingham through the 1990s, dramatizing a period when the artist (while attending college in Birmingham in 1990–1) lived alone with his father in the Cradley Heath council estate. The short film Ray focuses on his father’s worsening alcoholism and isolation during this time. Following their younger son’s removal to foster care, Billingham’s mother moved out, leaving Ray alone in the flat. By now a chronic alcoholic, Billingham’s father withdrew to his bedroom, drinking from the moment he woke until he fell asleep. Subsisting entirely on strong homebrewed ale, Ray never left the flat and totally lost track of time. Before Billingham left for college each morning, he would check on his father, leaving slices of bread on the dresser while he slept. Fear of finding his father dead made him dread returning home in the evenings. But sometime during this period, he started to become interested in the visual potential of the situation. He began to sketch his father in preparation for a series of figure-in-interior paintings,16 an iconological connection catalysed by his growing fascination with Walter Sickert: ‘Even though it was a tower block . . . in the early 1990s, his room still had the same atmosphere to me.’ Again: ‘The other thing, I imagined Sickert, I imagined he sat in the room and painted the figure from life’ (Billingham 2018). Indeed, it was primarily to resolve the difficulties of capturing the live figure that Billingham later acquired his first camera and began to photograph his subject. The short film Ray (officially released 2016)17 was used as a Kickstarter pilot to crowdfund production of the full-length feature Ray & Liz (2018).18 Its autobiographical subject matter extends the story of Ray by inserting two episodes into the framing scenario of the figure in the room. Beautifully shot on 16-mm celluloid at Academy (3:4) ratio (to suggest, Billingham says, the dimensions of the tower-block window or vintage TV screen), directed and edited through 2016 and 2017, Ray & Liz was given restricted release in international film festivals to widespread critical acclaim in autumn 2018.19 Chapter 6 – the final chapter of the book – identifies the precise way in which Ray & Liz cinematically reconstructs the Sickertian photographs from Ray’s a Laugh within the ‘diegetic horizon’ of autobiographical filmic space (Krauss 1999: 298). In Ray & Liz actors play Billingham’s family. His father (aged fifty-nine) is played by Patrick Romer and the younger Ray by Justin Salinger; his mother Liz (aged forty) is played by Deirdre Kelly (“White Dee” from Channel 4 reality series Benefits Street20 and Celebrity Big Brother) while the younger Liz (aged thirty) is captivatingly played by Ella Smith (Pl 33 and Fig. 6.7). These actors were auditioned in the first instance because of their physical similarities to Billingham’s parents.21 Deirdre Kelly, for example, originally cast for the pilot Ray (in which she has more screen time than in the later feature) bears a striking resemblance to Billingham’s mother which results in a level of verisimilitude that makes watching the scenes with her estranged on-screen husband disquieting at times, even weird. Because

INTRODUCTION    11

of the extensive extant photographic material (and video footage) of Billingham’s mother, Kelly’s performance of Liz has an uncanny (properly unheimlich) effect, generating an experience simultaneously familiar and strange (see Fig. 6.4). Yet it is not primarily her Doppelgänger-like physique that is pertinent in this connection but rather how White Dee augments the realization of Billingham’s mother with body-acting, voice and gesture. From Winson Green in West Birmingham – the location of James Turner (“Benefits”) Street – Dee performs a fluent rendition of Liz Billingham’s Black Country accent (where every chopped-off staccato sentence sounds like an aggressively rhetorical question). Apparently, it was producer of Ray & Liz, Jacqui Davies, who first noticed the resemblance following Dee’s pantomime performance as the fake ‘Duchess of Solihull’ on Celebrity Big Brother. Davies forwarded a picture to the artist with a one-word tag: ‘Liz!’ (Adams 2016). ‘As soon as I met her’, Billingham confirms, ‘I just thought she looked and sounded exactly like Liz’ (in Seymour 2018). Ironically, they had to wait until Dee’s expulsion from the Big Brother ‘House’ before they could pitch the role to her. ‘Smoking we had in common’, Dee agrees, ‘And the loud brashness I suppose. Anyway, I thought, I’ll give it a go!’ (in Adams 2016). Deirdre Kelly’s association with reality-television culture is not irrelevant to her casting as the artist’s mother. Regarding Billingham’s important (if inadvertent) contribution to the very post-documentary media-culture Kelly was later identified with, her involvement in his film enacts an unforeseen yet fascinating full-circle phenomenon: the unfortunate – yet predictable – accusations of sensationalist voyeurism and opportunism directed towards her from certain sections of the mass media echo the criticism Ray’s a Laugh received almost two decades prior. During its first series Benefits Street was attacked for its exploitative performance of the socially disadvantaged as welfare-dependent ‘underclass’ for entertainment, leading to complaints about the vilification of the working class and allegations of ‘poverty porn’ (Rose 2019; Seymour 2018; Davies 2014; Jensen in Fisher 2018; and Jones in Fisher 2018).22 ‘Ultimately’ – a more balanced review of Benefits Street by the late Mark Fisher concludes – the programme is a prime example of post-reality-TV documentary whereby a repeatable narrative formula is adapted to the creation of ‘intermittent sympathy for the poor and unemployed’ but only ‘to season an otherwise crude reproduction of negative stereotypes’ (Fisher 2018: 236). Fisher argues that such post-reality documentaries presuppose a middleclass perspective which ‘goes out of its way to conceal the class differences between those who are making the programmes and those who feature in them’ (2018: 237). However unintentional (and notwithstanding Billingham’s disclaimers regarding the film’s political context) casting White Dee as Liz represents an implicit engagement with the politics of class representation in popular culture.23 Ray & Liz, Steve Rose observes, ‘ticks many of these poverty porn boxes: drinking, smoking, obesity, neglect, tattoos, council estate squalor’ (Rose 2019). (He

12   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

concedes that the film ultimately avoids the accusation of poverty porn through its high aesthetic quality and attention to empirical [and period] detail.) In a review of the earlier feature Ray, Tim Adams anticipates this association by imagining future sociology dissertations on the ‘depiction of poverty in British culture and the ethics of intrusion’, describing a trajectory from Ray’s a Laugh to Benefits Street. He concludes by acknowledging the complexities of the artist’s contribution to the reality-culture phenomenon, suggesting (correctly) that although difficult to conceive ‘some of the extremes of reality TV without first having had the more complex intimacies of Billingham’s art’, his most recent non-fictional cinematic project arguably achieves a subtly intrusive form of post-reality photographic realism that reactivates his early family studies (Adams 2016) and somehow epitomizes Lay’s predictive neorealism that makes social realism ‘as we have come to know it along with all its predictable conventions look stilted and “unrealistic”’. Ray & Liz may be a ‘non-fictional’ (Barnouw 1974) feature film; but it is not documentary.

Photographic realism Photographic realism, as employed in this study, is defined as a ‘post-documentary’ encounter with the Real, facilitated by the refraction of the sensation of perceptual reality through the camera lens. The term derives from Kerstin Stremmel’s monograph Realism (2004) where, in a discussion of Straight Photography, she refers to the ‘confrontation with reality’ transferred to and through the photographic surface (2004: 18–19). As radically different as Billingham’s practice is from the ethos and practitioners of Straight Photography – not least because, despite its aggressive encounter with the Real, his splenetic realism involves a reflexive and self-referential aesthetic pictorialism crucial, in fact, to its visceral impact – it nevertheless shares with that movement the principle that everything in the photograph derives from the ‘photographic object’ (Stieglitz in Stremmel 2004: 18). Reference to the pictorialism of Billingham’s work is intended to capture the artist’s aesthetic hypersensitivity to the structure of the image: his alertness, that is, to the formal and compositional rhythms of the optical surface, to subtleties of detail and texture and to what used to be called the ‘integrity of the picture plane’. In fact, as we shall consider, the ‘unsentimental and unflinching’ realism of Billingham’s photographs (as Wendy Everett observes of the films of Terence Davies) is entwined with a ‘self-consciousness and formal complexity’ (Everett 2005: 189). ‘I want to keep the intimacy,’ Billingham asserts, ‘but do away with the subject matter’ (in Remes 2007b). Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies 1988) in examining both ‘the suffering and the joy of family life’, on one level, epitomizes the kind of facticity associated with British documentary

INTRODUCTION    13

realism – with the writer-director’s working-class background taken to confirm its authenticity – and, on another level, represents an aesthetic accomplishment of immense formal sophistication and artistic subtlety. Attempts to characterize Davies’s film as social realism, Everett concludes, are compelled to accommodate its powerfully affecting aesthetic aspects, namely, its ‘striking textures and images, subtle rhythms and innovative camera work’, aspects, she points out, that have traditionally considered incompatible with straight realism (2005: 189). Using precisely the same argument, the premise of this book is that in order to understand the dangerously intimate post-documentary confrontation with the Real involved in Billingham’s work, it is also necessary to acknowledge the richly reflexive, subtle aesthetic structure of its photographic surfaces. Apropos Davies’s films, Billingham’s art practice is treated in this book as irreducibly, ‘both social document and aesthetic composition, both complex and easily accessible’ (2005: 189). Ultimately, however, the pictorialism (that is, the artist’s sensitivity to immanent questions of framing, spatial interrelationships and internal structure) does nothing to compromise the intense encounter with the traumatic Real that his photography – and, lately, his cinematic practice – simultaneously enacts. In a review of the artist’s Ikon gallery exhibition in 2000, Richard Cork inadvertently (yet prophetically) identifies the prevailing theme of Billingham’s lifework. Commenting on the short video projection Ray in Bed (1999), Cork observes that the artist ‘seems driven by the need to get as near as possible to his father, but the urge is thwarted when the camera’s focus mechanism breaks down’. And although this technical failure results in ‘soft and lyrical’, semiabstract painterly imagery, nevertheless, the son’s ‘desire to gain a greater degree of closeness to Ray’ is the predominant motivation of the borderline-invasive proximity of his explorations. Yet this impulse, significantly, ‘remains unfulfilled’. And Cork concludes: We are left, at the end, with his profound longing for an intimacy he can never attain. (CORK 2003: 39)

This statement, in my view, encapsulates the entire arc of Billingham’s work from the earliest explorations of his father to his most recent feature film. Undertaking to methodically follow that arc, this book will conclude that Billingham’s entire family project is motivated by the predicament of paternity, even if this motivation only comes to light and finally achieves closure in Ray & Liz, this predicament can be expressed as the longing for an intimacy that can never be attained.

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1

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE 1 EARLY FAMILY STUDIES (1990–4)

Who’s Looking at the Family? Richard Billingham first came to the attention of the art world in 1994 when three monochrome photographs of his father were selected for the high-profile survey show Who’s Looking at the Family? at the Barbican Arts Centre in London. Curated by Val Williams (with selectors Brigitte Lardinois and Carol Brown)2 the exhibition had a programme of over thirty-five artists, incorporated rich marginalia of experimental research photography, archive and retrouvé material, and featured established practitioners such as Sally Mann, Larry Sultan, Thomas Struth and Martin Parr (Williams 1994; Warren 2005: 131). The idea of examining the family in photographic culture was conceived when John Hoole, curator at the Barbican, invited Williams to propose something for the space.3 Social context gave the premise an unanticipated zeitgeist edge. Spanning the mid-1980s to 1994, the exhibition’s frame of reference intersected with the lifecycle of Thatcherism and was organized in the aftermath of the collapse of parliamentary support for the prime minister who had, during her eleven-year premiership (and three election victories), famously advocated traditional family values as a key moral principle of conservative ideology; ironically, however, as is well recognized, the economic paradigm espoused by Thatcher – and that she contrived to establish – generated the very social conditions that threatened survival of the family structure she promoted (Fisher 2009: 32–3). The critical acclaim Who’s Looking at the Family? acquired can, in this context, be attributed to its perceived response to the way that topics such as ‘child abuse,

domestic violence, the growing divorce rate and single parenthood’ were putting the myth of the benevolent patriarchal family core into question (Williams 1994: 14–15). Added to this sociopolitical background, the show’s concept resonated with the argument in Susan Sontag’s influential On Photography (1977) that the nuclear family (what she calls ‘that claustrophobic unit’) subsists today only in brittle images between the leaves of the photo album: ‘Photography’, Sontag declares, ‘becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrialising countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery’. It is precisely with the obsolescence of the conventional family paradigm that photography starts to function as an ersatz substitute for its lost utopian nucleus (Sontag 1977: 8–9). The tension is acknowledged in the catalogue essay. With reference to Diane Arbus’s unsettling family portraits for Esquire and the Sunday Times of the late 1960s, Williams invokes the appropriate vocabulary for the pathologization of the family documented in the exhibition: ‘Lost childhoods’ are here ‘remembered, the fears and delights of parenthood minutely examined. Closed doors . . . opened and memories exhumed’ (1994: 15). Tending towards the depiction of a darker, more anxious domestic scenario, the Barbican show, in promoting a heterogeneous palette, sought, at the same time, to pursue a more intimate picture of atypical family life. This ambition is reflected in the diversity of photographic genres encompassed, where documentary approaches are combined with more knowing aesthetic and fictionalizing modes in an effort to establish correspondences among a broad spectrum of image styles, juxtaposing artists like Thomas Ruff, Susan Lipper and Florence Chevallier with less orthodox and amateur footage (the Boorman Family archive) as well as found material and material of unknown provenance. Born 1970, Billingham was the youngest artist in Who’s Looking at the Family? and at the time was still completing his degree in Fine Art (Painting) at Sunderland University. Most of the other participants were established, mid-career artists, on average twenty years older than him (and capable of testifying to the paradigm shift explored in the exhibition). Accordingly, the curator’s description of his triptych in the catalogue essay (perhaps the very first discussion of Billingham’s art) provides valuable insight into how his work was originally received. Noting a significant incompatibility with typical 1990s style, Williams senses the trace of a ‘more antique’ tradition of image-making in his photography, closer, in its grainy ambiguity, to Edward Curtis, even Nadar, than to Sultan, Parr or Nick Waplington. Although these ‘wistful portraits’ are, she admits, imbued with a ‘certain nobility’, in their almost damaged precarity, they seem haunted by the fragility of existence – by the apparition of a life, she suggests, on ‘the edge of an abyss’ (1994: 44). Asked why she selected an unknown student’s work for this prestigious international show, Williams answers that, on the recommendation of Michael Collins, then picture editor of the Telegraph Magazine,4 she visited Sunderland

16   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

to meet Billingham and was immediately convinced of his contribution to the exhibition’s premise.5 ‘It was there that I saw the photos which we eventually exhibited,’ she says. ‘I don’t think they were a triptych at the time – I just put the three together . . . and I thought they would look great in the show’ (Williams 2018). In relation to the theme, Billingham’s ‘allusive’ black-and-white photographs, in this format, ‘worked really well alongside [the more established exponents] because we tried to select work that was about a personal family story rather than just about “the family” and this fitted in with the majority of the other photographers’ (Williams 2018). The fact that ‘Richard was a student,’ Michael Collins adds, ‘never mattered to me’. As well as suggesting Billingham, Collins was associated with some of the interesting fringe selections of the show such as the Apes of London Zoo project and the Boorman Family archive (both first published in the Telegraph Magazine).6 I would publish and commission students and complete unknowns in the Telegraph Magazine, and when looking at photographs for the first time, I cared not whether they came in a mahogany box, a monograph or wrapped in newspaper. (COLLINS 2018)

Self-conscious and slightly intimidated, on the opening night, Billingham worried that his piece was installed in an incongruous way. ‘I stood by my work,’ he remembers, ‘but nobody really looked at it, it was in a place underneath the stairs’ (Billingham 2018). He felt that his triptych seemed disconnected from the central circulation of exhibits: ‘it was a bit of a realisation’, he later recalled, ‘to see so many large, pin sharp images, professionally framed behind glass. My blurry pictures, mounted on board and with a badly written statement, must have seemed a bit out of place’ (Billingham 2013). Despite these reservations, inclusion of his photography in the Barbican show was of enormous significance for the young artschool graduate, and, as we will see, had important consequences for his career.7

Triptych of Ray (1990) Coarse-grained and out of focus – indeed scarcely more than a photographic sketch – Triptych of Ray (1990, Fig. 1.1) shows a figure by three, emaciated, toothless, hunched in the half-light, drinking from a catering-size Martini bottle. Torso inclined slightly to the right, thin forearm leaning on thigh, hand dangling limply between knees, he tips the incongruously large bottle towards us. The bottle is the only distinct detail in an otherwise indistinct scene. The figure in the central panel has slightly more salience. Seen from the waist up, and in profile, the orientation and rigidity of the form suggest that he has just risen from the bed. He presses the bottle protectively to his chest as if cradling a

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   17

FIGURE 1.1  Richard Billingham, Triptych of Ray (1990). Black & white photographs on aluminium (160 × 106 cm each).

young child. A whitened thumb-knuckle, and the veins running visibly through the back of his hand, betray the tightness of that grip. Although the bottle, located at the geometric nucleus of the central panel, is undoubtedly the principal motif of the triptych, it is the effect of the contents of that bottle that constitutes the theme of the work. In the right panel, the least clear of the three, the figure is back on the bed again, now without the bottle, in an attitude paralleling the first panel, except in this image, his head is turned back slightly, away from the source of light, looking over his shoulder, surprised, perhaps, by a sound in the room behind him. Yet, there’s a perceptible sequential decrease in distinctness which has the effect of making the frail figure appear to diminish visibly – literally fading before our eyes or merging gradually with his grisaille surroundings – as we scan the three images. Unused to this level of opacity in the trompe l’oeil realism of straight photographic space, its primary effect in this instance is to emphasize the impressionistic, painterly qualities of the work: if the blur-speck interference serves to draw attention to the optical surface of the print, disrupting and undermining the condition of ‘photographic transparency’ (Lopes 2003) with a grainy sfumato, and inhibiting visual resolution, these are, paradoxically, the precise qualities that tend to amplify the work’s aesthetic qualities, imbuing the event with a rich and ambiguous relationship of pattern, surface and depth that appeals primarily to a tactile (rather than an optical) modality. These atmospheric effects are responsible for the lyrical quality of the piece. Reminiscent of Denise Colomb’s vaguely macabre asylum portraits of French dramatist Antonin Artaud taken in 1947, Billingham registers some indistinct yet intense state in his subject, a moment of internalized privacy, something that remains inscrutable, a heightened mood that, even if ultimately ineffable, is nevertheless rendered in some manner ‘precise’. Words like loneliness, ennui or apathy seem inadequate to characterize this elusive state; perhaps this is because, at a deeper level – reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s evocative etchings of the 1920s, the plays of Samuel Beckett or Francesca Woodman’s convulsive self-portraits – Billingham’s early photographs of his father, in which he’s reduced to a pale ghostlike form in the dwindling light of evening, evoke something more profound and existential, that condition perhaps of ‘quiet desperation’ that Henry David Thoreau identified as the silent and solitary condition of lives in modern society (Thoreau 1995: 4). Then again, the inscrutable look could just be the desensitizing effects of the alcohol. Inclusion of Billingham in Who’s Looking at the Family? had the effect of inscribing the artist into a prototypically British neorealist visual paradigm that includes Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows, Chris Killip, Nancy Hellebrand, Paul Graham, Shirley Baker, Keith Pattison and, most significantly perhaps, Bill Brandt, whose (then) newly rediscovered documentary photographs of working-class family life in the tenements of Birmingham (commissioned by the Bournville

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   19

Village Trust during the Second World War) were exhibited in Birmingham Central Library in 1990. In their stark formal austerity, it is tempting to regard Brandt’s documentary photographs as iconographic, if not (at the very least) geopolitical, antecedents of Billingham’s aesthetic.8 In that they also double as artistically compelling interior studies of period kitchen scenes, domestic work, bedrooms, Brandt seems a plausible influence (James and Sadler 2004). This, however, is not as obvious as it may appear. Billingham insists that, although he was in college in Birmingham at the time, he never saw Brandt’s exhibition ‘or any other photography [while] on foundation’.9 We must therefore exercise caution from the outset regarding what may appear to be leading photographic references in the effort to thematize Billingham’s work. Although it may be tempting to contextualize Billingham’s early photographs with reference to canonical British social realist or documentary photographic practice, it is also necessary to remain sceptical about connections that seem critically relevant but on closer scrutiny turn out to be spurious. For Billingham has consistently – at least since the late 1990s – maintained that, at this stage in his career, he didn’t rate photography as an independent aesthetic form. It never crossed his mind when photographing his father, for example, that he was making ‘art’; he was just relying on a quick and convenient means of image production to explore and register an existential situation. These photographs were made without any viewers in mind. This caveat – namely, that the young art student was not interested in other photographers during this period – may entail acknowledging that the history of photography may ultimately have very little to reveal regarding the development of Billingham’s practice at this point. More plausible (if equally coincidental) antecedents may be identified in the broader context of the European heritage, such as, for instance, Manet’s painting le Buveur d’Absinthe (1859) with its lumpen nocturnal palette and ‘fierce immediacy’ (Adams 2004: 36), the features of the figure intentionally smeared to suggest a state of advanced inebriation; the vividness of the black bottle rolling into the gutter offset by the hallucinogenic glass (a later supplement to the painting) hovering like a hologram on the wall behind the ‘ragpicker’ thematically prefigure Billingham’s study of drunkenness.10 And as suggested, Billingham’s photographs recall the sparse theatrical imagery of Samuel Beckett, in particular Krapp’s Last Tape (1959) with its ‘patho-comic’ depiction of the ‘wearish’ old man in his darkened ‘den’, drinking and listening to diary recordings of his earlier self on tape (Gontarski in Fletcher 1978: 146; Beckett 1959: 9).11 Isolated in the enclosing interior darkness, Beckett’s character establishes a rich formal resonance with Billingham’s haunting images of inertia. Yet it is at the formal level that the most striking parallels appear. Beckett’s directions include a tripartite dark-to-light transition, as well as scenic and costume admixtures of ‘the colours of black and white’, in sympathy with the references to the interplay

20   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

of light and dark embedded in the text (Beckett 1959: 11; Knowlson, in Fletcher 1978: 133). But compositionally, Billingham’s piece invokes Francis Bacon. The British painter’s post-war secularization of the triptych is characterized by fidelity to a grammar of symmetry and chromatic consistency that he sustained throughout his career. It is perfected in his classical (post-1970) triptychs,12 where fields of flat colour delimit apartment-like spaces within which aggressively rendered figures are established. Bacon’s compositional strategy draws attention to the claustrophobia of the spatial environment while simultaneously emphasizing the formality of the pictorial structure. The left-panel figure, typically oriented to the right, reflects (in orientation) the figure in the third panel, and is directed (back, inward) to face the figure in the central panel resulting in a powerful tectonic symmetry that generates many ‘rhythmic’ variations among the panels. Although suggestive of multiple lateral and cyclic conjunctions, the fate of these, as the painter himself insisted, remains inconclusive. Against the wall of the gallery, grid-like intervals punctuate the panels – white elisions apportioning the imagery into the paused phases of an unfolding process. ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them,’ Bacon notoriously remarked to David Sylvester, ‘leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as a snail leaves its slime’ (2000: 33). Despite the actual separation of the three images in the Baconian triptych, however, Gilles Deleuze remarks that there remains a significant ‘distributive unity’ of meaning traversing the panels (2003: 85). Yet this transitive relationship is neither strictly ‘narrative nor logical’ (2003: 69). For the Bacon triptych should never ‘imply a progression’, Deleuze argues; it does not ‘tell a story’. Therefore, it is mistaken, he insists, to ‘read’ any left-to-right succession into it. Yet the triptych formation nevertheless remains strongly suggestive of temporal or ‘rhythmic’ process that, albeit obliquely, produces multiple effects of ‘excessive presence’, that is, a kind of physical emanation that exceeds the logic of representation (2003: 50). This argument clearly defers to Bacon’s resistance to ‘illustration’ and mimesis, his lifelong rejection of narrative literalism, to which his pictorial objective to ‘convey a presence beyond likeness’ was opposed (Ades 1985: 10). ‘It helps to avoid storytelling,’ Bacon said simply, ‘if the figures are painted on three different canvases’ (in Sylvester 1995: 122). Billingham’s triptych, in an analogous way to Bacon, picks up various rhythmic patterns across the distinct images giving the work a rich internal coherence: the repetitive wallpaper print and the plaid shirt; the translucent skin and the brittle hair; the glass bottle and the dusty light – these examples of internal consistency and textural alliteration are reinforced by the scale of the figure relative to its grounding structure. Such immanent textures, indeed, assist in conveying something of that ‘trail of human presence’ Bacon alluded to. Existence is witnessed passing between the phases of its panels. Yet the strong sense of temporal passage sustained by the formal relationships among the panels

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   21

is complicated by the triadic sitting-standing-sitting rhythm, that, because nonsequential, suggests repetition – the circulation of dead time in confined space. The sense of being locked into an inexorable cycle is palpable. ‘There is a circular organisation in the triptych,’ Deleuze observes, ‘rather than a linear one’ (2003: 72). He also points out that ‘the order of succession, when there is one, in the triptych, does not necessarily go from left to right’ (2003: 76). Drawing attention to the precise parameters of the scene, the formal reflexivity of Billingham’s triptych – completed by the white boning against the wall, like blank beats between scenes – makes us conscious of the limits of the figure’s interior world. An acute awareness of solitude and confinement results, as the limits of Ray’s world seem to close in around him. What remains of content is simple and severe: a man alone in his palpably darkening bedroom.

Figure in a room Billingham began photographing his father in 1990. He was living alone with him in a high-rise sink estate in the West Midlands town of Cradley Heath since his mother moved out earlier that year. Enrolled on the foundation course at Bournville School of Art in Birmingham (Billingham in Lingwood 1998a: 58), the nineteen-year-old student treated cohabitation with his father as a purely functional arrangement. College was over an hour’s commute by train; and he worked casual shift hours at the Kwik Save discount supermarket in the evenings, which meant that he was out most of the time. Interaction between father and son was routine and cursory (Billingham 2018). Yet he was becoming more aware of his presence: ‘there’d be periods where I’d be with him in the flat and I would see him,’ the artist recently recalled (Billingham in Evans 2016: 2). Unemployed for a decade and with no realistic possibility of re-employment, Raymond Billingham had become a chronic (and increasingly solitary) alcoholic. He drank alone in the bedroom of the flat until he fell asleep and, on waking, would immediately start drinking again. His life became increasingly defined by the limits of this cycle. Apart from a neighbour who supplied him with (very strong) homebrew and cashed his welfare cheque (using the money to ‘pay the bills’) and Richard’s mother, Elizabeth (1950–2006) – who continued to look in on him once a week (but usually just to swindle him out of the remains of his dole) – Ray had no contact with the outside world (Billingham 2013). He stayed in his [bed]room all of the time except when he wanted to go to the toilet; he never came out otherwise. He would drink to get to sleep and then wake up, have a drink until he got to sleep again. (BILLINGHAM in Evans 2016)

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At a certain point, his son started to take a pictorial interest in the situation. Reimagining the strange experience of dwelling with his agoraphobic father, his perception gradually shifted. ‘I first started painting my father Ray drinking,’ he says, ‘looking in the mirror, looking out the window, alone in his room’ (in Evans 2016: 2). Ray’s confined living space, he adds, ‘began to take on an outward expression of his inner life and I had a strong urge to make paintings about the situation’. He explains: His room was meagrely furnished with few traces of Liz but to me at the time, the sparse objects still remaining seemed to take on a symbolic significance – the glow of the electric fire, an old key, his beer stained glass, two litre home brew bottles, a nub end, the oval dressing-table mirror, or a teenage photo of Liz on the windowsill. (BILLINGHAM 2013)

Some naïve observational studies sketchily rendered in acrylic on Kwik Save cardboard packaging (and some on bedsheets) survive – their curiosity value being the first attempts to register the situation Billingham found himself in. He struggled with the medium, however. Unsatisfied with initial efforts, and attributing their inadequacies to the unexpected perplexities of painting from life, he turned to photography (but more as a means than an end): I thought the camera would help in making a painting that was more detailed / finished and not just a sketch from life. Ray would only pose for say 15 minutes and would want to move after that. With photos I thought that I could copy a bit from one and a bit from another and compose a painting from parts. (BILLINGHAM 2018)

Initially intended as a convenient exploratory way of gathering visual information for planned paintings, but gradually assuming an aesthetic singularity of its own, the camera would, in time, eclipse the painting intention completely. So, in 1990, with his camera, a Russian-made Zenit 11 35-mm manual-focus SLR acquired on credit (by convincing the camera-shop sales assistant that he was a librarian),13 he entered his father’s bedroom and looked through the viewfinder at the figure within (RAL #17, p. 33 Plate 1).

Raymond Billingham (1931–2007) Ray Billingham worked as an unskilled machinist in one of the metalwork factories in the region until he accepted voluntary redundancy in 1980, receiving

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   23

£7,400 as a severance payment. By the early 1980s metal fabrication in the West Midlands – once the world-renowned economic ‘heartland of England’ – was in terminal decline. Unemployment in the Black Country was already 2.1 per cent above the national average; and as prospects for school-leavers became increasingly grim, for the semi-literate Ray (then in his late forties-early fifties) there seemed no hope of re-employment. He became one of the countless undocumented casualties of the post-industrial economic revolution of the early 1980s. Regional economic (and cultural) degradation (especially in the industrial North of England) was exacerbated by the recently elected Conservative administration’s programme of deindustrialization under new prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Tory commitment to the free-market economic model, it is now well known, led to the adoption of radical policies designed to catalyse economic growth; but promotion of new competitive business management systems and the high-tech infrastructural foundations and financial hierarchies that support them had dramatic and devastating consequences for traditional public-sector, unionized English working-class culture. Aggressive support of private business interests generated a new upwardly mobile individualistic and competitive demographic. Improved standards of living were enjoyed at the cost of embittered economic polarization between high-income and low-income communities; and this process activated a pernicious and irreversible erosion of community and led to the emergence of new disenfranchised social strata, captured, notoriously, under the catchall category of the ‘underclass’. By 1990, with the economy entering recession and following two (complete) terms of office, Thatcher was forced to resign (during her third term due in part to her detested Community Charge ‘poll tax’ policy). But according to a recent study of the state of culture under her administration, British society became unrecognizable during her tenure, leading to a state ‘where the rich got richer while the poor became increasingly impoverished (with 20 per cent of the people living under the poverty line), reversing a 40-year pattern where incomes were gradually growing more equal’ (Quart 2006: 19). When Ray quit work the Billinghams were living in 19 Sidaway Street, a threebed mid-terrace house (which Ray inherited from his parents)14 in Old Hill adjacent to Eliza Tinsley’s famous metal fabrication factory15 near the Cradley Heath railway (Billingham in Watkins 2004). At the time, they were enjoying the proceeds of Ray’s redundancy, yet, disastrously for his family, Ray didn’t consider it necessary to apply for social welfare. And as his reserve rapidly diminished – squandered on this and that, frittered away in the pub and at the bookies, shelled out restocking the place with expensive liquor and spirits – large sums of cash were frequently mislaid, ‘borrowed’ by random visitors entering from the street or stolen by ‘people who’d been in prison staying with us . . . and that’ (Billingham in Watkins 2004). ‘I know it sounds strange,’ Richard recalled later, ‘but really it was because my dad did not know how to fill in a form, he could write, but he had never had to fill in forms. So he didn’t sign on [at the Labour Exchange to receive unemployment

24   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

benefit] for a long time’ (in Adams 2016). As their economic situation deteriorated, the family descended into poverty. ‘After six months’, Billingham remembers, ‘we had no food in the fridge’ (Adams 2016). In an interview around the time of his nomination for the Tate Gallery Turner Prize (in 2001), Billingham attributes this to his parents’ inability to budget. He explains: ‘If you say to a working-class person, “You can have £100 now or £500 next year,” they’d take the £100. If you’ve got money, you spend it. You live like Lord Muck for a day, then starve for six days . . . You don’t see a future’ (Chesshyre 2001). Around this time Maurice, a local self-employed opportunist (the archetypal second-hand car salesman cum construction-manager) persuaded Ray that their house was worthless and offered him £2,500 for it, cash-in-hand. Incredibly, but under the deepening circumstances,16 Ray accepted the offer. Ultimately, however, they received about a thousand pounds of the promissory sum (in Watkins 2004). Bereft of their Old Hill home, the Billingham family relocated to a vacant apartment on the eleventh floor of Addenbrooke Court, one of the three 16-storey tower blocks of the Riddins Mound council estate constructed in the late 1960s beside the Halesowen Road railway bridge in Cradley Heath. They were transported there by Maurice (who had arranged their relocation through the council). Impatient to get the family out of the house as quickly as possible, he hastily packed their belongings (into bin liners) on a trailer before driving them at speed to their new home. ‘When we moved to the tower block’, Billingham recalls, ‘you didn’t play out much. You’d get beaten up or have a brick thrown at you.’17 He was 13 years old. I just hated growing up in that tower block. (BILLINGHAM in ADAMS 2016)

The door was ripped off and, inside, it was dark and grim and covered in aggressive graffiti. I always thought it was like the caves of Lascaux with racist graffiti. But it was very threatening. There was piss and shit on the walls and floor and the lifts were filthy and dark. During the wintertime it was terrible. You had to shut yourself off in the flat. That’s why I didn’t like it. We’d hear people shouting in the corridor and fighting, drunk. You’d think – they could easily kick that door in. (BILLINGHAM 2018)

Convinced that education provided a means of escape from his disadvantaged background (‘I didn’t understand what a University was only that it was a passport out’ [in Chesshyre 2001]) Richard spent many evenings and weekends reading in the public library; and in 1990, he was accepted on the foundation programme of Bournville School of Art. In the meantime, Billingham’s younger brother Jason had been taken into foster care following his discovery sleeping rough in the shed of a friend’s house.

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   25

Soon after this incident Elizabeth moved out and relocated to an apartment on the seventh floor of Wesley Court, one of the other blocks on the Riddins Mound estate (the one familiar, in fact, from the photographs in the later publication Ray’s a Laugh [1996, see Chapter Two]). Over the next two years (while Richard was at college) his mother continued to visit Ray. (Liz’s regular visits weren’t motivated out of concern for Ray’s wellbeing however, but as mentioned, to manipulate him out of his welfare money.) Supplied each day with strong ale by ‘Psychedelic’ Sid who cooked homebrew in his sixteenth-floor flat (and who Billingham now calls an ‘enabler’) his father, aged fifty-nine, became a hopeless alcoholic. ‘He always drank.’ Billingham acknowledges, ‘But before then only in the pub, like everyone else’ (Billingham 2013; Adams 2016). Now, with Liz gone and having a steady supply of liquor, Ray withdrew semi-permanently to his bedroom, where the serious drinking – that is to say, the persistent, solipsistic and compulsive drinking – started. When he awoke, his father would sit on the edge of the bed with his legs crossed and, looking at his reflection in the mirror of his dressing-table, listening to the radio (he didn’t have a television), or warming himself by the three-bar electric fire, drank until he fell asleep. When Billingham returned home in the evenings, his father was already paralytic. ‘Every time I came back from college, he was lying in bed drunk,’ the artist recalls, ‘I saw a lot of that and it stuck in my mind’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 58). Sometimes, when he got back, Ray was lying unconscious on the floor where he had collapsed earlier (Untitled 1990). On the way home, he would wonder if his father was dead, and imagine opening the door to a corpse (Billingham 2013; Chesshyre 2001). He often entered Ray’s room just to confirm that he was still breathing, his body still warm. Before leaving in the morning, Richard would leave slices of bread on his bedroom dresser. But to act, to do something about it, he adds, ‘would be a fulltime job wouldn’t it? I’d be his carer’ (in Chesshyre 2001). The 1990–1 photographs document this situation. Some were published in 1996 in Ray’s a Laugh and remain formally distinct from the majority of the images in that publication (see Chapter 2). Many, like the three exemplary images that comprise the Triptych of Ray, are black and white and, if not, almost monochrome in their dreary chiaroscuro. Grainy, indistinct – sometimes completely out of focus – these photographic sketches, the first studies of Billingham’s father, capture a haunted, wraithlike form diminishing to shadow before our eyes. Of Untitled (1990) (RAL #53 p. 98) (Fig. 1.2) a once-removed photograph of his father’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror, Billingham comments: It’s like he’s fading away because the drink or something and it makes you realise that everything is very fragile. . . . I didn’t know the picture would look

26   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

FIGURE 1.2  Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990), RAL #53 [EE Plate 52] (1996). Black and white photograph.

like that. It wasn’t my intention to have it blurred, but for some reason it was out of focus; I think it’s better because it makes it look like he’s withering away more graphically. (IN LINGWOOD 1998a)

By this stage Ray had become a decrepit, desiccated figure, and the 1990–1 photographs capture something of this state. In the low-ceilinged, sparsely furnished bedroom, under the naked light bulb, an emaciated form is trying to get up from the floor, or is lying prone and crumpled, passed out on the carpet. Sometimes he’s in bed half-asleep, wrapped in blankets to the chin; sometimes he’s sitting, fully dressed, hunched Artaud-like (head bowed, legs crossed) on the edge of the mattress listening to the radio and drinking, or sadly warming himself in front of the Dimplex electric fire. Others show him standing at the small window in the corner of the room (Fig. 1.3) with his head under the lace curtains. One startling image captures the moment of waking. Wrapped in the shabby blanket, he peers out with an uncomprehending, hypnagogic, half-afraid stare (Untitled [1990] Fig. 1.4). Another photo shows him yawning, a great dark toothless yawn, into the mirror (Untitled [1990] Fig. 1.5).

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   27

FIGURE 1.3 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990). Black and white photograph on aluminium (116 × 77.5 cm).

FIGURE 1.4 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990). Black and white photograph on aluminium (73 × 111.3 cm).

28   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

FIGURE 1.5 Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990). Black and white photograph on aluminium (72.4 × 110.5 cm).

The unaccustomed viewpoint Richard, meanwhile, focused on his studies. Education offered the most immediate opportunity to extricate himself from his disadvantaged social conditions, and it was during this period, facilitated by the Bournville art foundation programme that he developed a profound interest in the history of British art and, particularly, in turn-of-century London post-Impressionists Walter Sickert, Spenser Gore and Harold Gilman (Billingham 2018).18 Of these, however, it was Sickert (1860– 1942) – cosmopolitan cynic, impresario and grandiloquent spokesman of the Camden Town Group of neorealist painters19 – that had the most important and lasting impact on him. Sickert’s grim utilitarian realism appealed to Billingham. Reflecting on his discovery of the English painter, the artist speaks of an instinctive identification with something inexplicit in his work that related to his own lived experience, and something markedly absent from comparative scenes by Degas, Bonnard or Vuillard. It’s clear that Sickert elicited a significant perceptual switch for Billingham that enabled a distancing effect, or ‘objectification’, of his immediate domestic and social circumstances (Billingham 2018). At some point, that is, he began to perceive the situation through the trope of the genre interior; and as it became increasingly refracted through these aesthetic lenses, the frail silhouette in the strange half-light of his bedroom began to dissolve into the afterimage of a sad Edwardian basement apartment. A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   29

‘I liked the sparse interiors,’ the artist comments. ‘And though the figures blended into the space of the rooms, they still seemed very “present”.’20 They become part of the space. And yet they were very present at the same time. (BILLINGHAM 2018)

It is this sense of presence, above all, that captivates Billingham in Sickert. Characterized as that which imbues the figure in the room with an existential actuality that transcends its compositional placement, this presence (a spatial phenomenon) somehow, for Billingham, evokes ‘the feeling of time’, as if the figures are lying in bed all day or something with not much else to do, and perhaps with a feeling of hopelessness. This, he concludes, ‘related to how I saw my environment back then’.21 These observations refer specifically to the sequence of interiors Sickert painted in the first decade of the twentieth century – the so-called Camden Town Nudes. Discussing Degas’s quotidian scenes, Sickert referred cryptically to capturing ‘unaccustomed points of view’ associated with the presence of the figure in an interior (Sickert 1910; 2000: 262; Adams 2007: 2). And the sensation of crawling time that Billingham detects in this cycle is suggested through the credible emplacement of the figure in its musty, underlit surroundings. Composed around a set of heterogeneous pictorial elements, Sickert’s interiors integrate the figure within the closed confines of the domestic environment and its assemblage of repeatable contents: iron bedstead, wardrobe, hardwood chair, densely patterned wallpaper, tangled clothing (or discarded shoes), faded carpet. The claustrophobic ambience associated with this series, however, is an achievement of a specific handling of light and shade. Light in Sickert’s interiors is carefully calibrated. Seeking (what the painter referred to as) contre-jour (against daylight) effects, his tableaux are infused with a dim, overall flicker, suggestive of light struggling through a small dust-encrusted back window and incompletely elucidating the figure within. It’s almost as if we must search out the figure, pushing visually through Sickert’s oppressive halflight, which, as Shone remarks, tends to creep, ‘feeling its way across a room leaving much unexplained, to reveal here an outline, there an accent’ (Shone 1988: 48). As a result, Shone writes, the figure emerges incrementally ‘from the bedclothes . . . for one arrested moment before dissolution sets in and the colour surrenders to an airless monotone’ (1988: 40). Billingham would have learned that the paintings of this period developed their distinctive formal parameters slowly, and very gradually, from protracted exploratory study. Indeed, in his published criticism, Sickert appealed to a working ‘process of cumulative observation’, through which the components of subject

30   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

matter, style and composition painstakingly assume precise definition, eventually fusing into coherent pictorial form (Sickert 2000). Billingham emphasizes the painter’s investigative ‘sketches’: Sickert refers to the gradual achievement of an articulated scene from a slow, heuristic accumulation of observed detail. ‘A painter [for instance] might draw a hand or draw a face or an object,’ Billingham remarks, and only then ‘they’ll construct a painting from those things’ (2018). This incremental approach should not be construed as the conscious elaboration of a unified whole from a collocation of smaller elements, but rather regarded as a process of empirical research, an accumulative layering of tacit knowledge concerning the underlying form and structure of perceptual reality (Billingham 2018) – a process, that is, of the optical analysis of objects in light, yielding visual information about how those objects are configured relative to each other in space, with the aim of transcribing the texture of perceptual experience more convincingly to the pictorial surface (Billingham 2018). ‘The other thing’, Billingham quickly adds, ‘is that I imagined Sickert . . . that he sat in the room and painted the figure from life’ (2018). Often communicating his aesthetic objectives indirectly (in this instance with reference to Jean-Francois Millet) Sickert advocated a focused fidelity to empirical reality. With an intense commitment to the specificity of the everyday, he was searching for, as he put it, the ‘sensation of a page torn from the book of life’ (Sickert 2000: 242). Emphasizing this objective the painter invokes the sensation of ‘someone, somewhere’ that can only ever be successfully conveyed through precise and persistent observation (Sickert 2000: 377). The salience of the Sickert connection was later reconfirmed for Billingham at the celebrated exhibition of the Camden Town Nudes at the Courtauld London in 2008: It was just those images. I went round saw that show and I realised that they had a great presence, those figures. When I was a student I only saw the images in books, so maybe I didn’t know they had a presence. (BILLINGHAM 2018)

Boasting a direct affiliation with (Parisian) impressionism, Sickert claimed that he had studied under Whistler; he also promoted his credentials with reference to his painter father who had spent a semester in Thomas Couture’s atelier. Perhaps this was merely a means of compensating for the fact that he had little in the way of formal training (Baron 2006; Shone 1988: 15); nevertheless, as an émigré in Continental Europe, Sickert did circulate in the (then somewhat passé) demi-monde of the nineteenth-century avant-garde; and in fact it was Whistler (who hired Sickert as a factotum) who arranged a crucial visit to Paris (to deliver Arrangement in Grey and Black [1871, aka ‘Whistler’s Mother’] to the salon) thereby setting up pivotal introductions for the journeyman painter. Although Manet was

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   31

terminally ill at the time, in 1883, Sickert did meet and befriend (his idol) Degas (Wilton 2001: 196). So, indirectly through Whistler, the English painter enjoyed a relatively unmediated (and, for him, artistically invaluable) induction to the Parisian salon milieu (Capet 2007). Credentials notwithstanding, Sickert was (and remains) an atypical impressionist. His chromatic scale, for starters, is darker, more limited and severe than the paradigm case; the handing of pigment is brusque to the point of rough and ready, and applied to the visualization of a coldly unsentimental subject matter. Compulsive attraction to ‘socially inferior’ (i.e. proletarian, female) subjects, although not uncommon among impressionists, assumes, under Sickert’s jaundiced gaze, a disquieting and distinctly non-aesthetic intentionality.22 Purposely pursuing models that presented opportunities to be rendered in an unsympathetic light (Shone 1988: 51; Reed in Fry 1996: 129), the English painter set out to adapt the European genre interior to what he called the ‘gross materiality of working-class urban space’ (David Peters Corbett in Tickner 2000: 17). The dismal spaces in which Sickert interpolated his depleted figures are realized in a sombre, deliberately restricted palette, which yet somehow doubles as the essence – the soul – of the mundane. Reminiscent of James Joyce’s contemporaneous writings, Sickert’s aesthetic invites comparison with the Irish novelist’s early short fiction, composed, as the writer himself put it, in a style of ‘scrupulous meanness’. Even if bright facets of hidden colour can be discerned in unfamiliar places in Sickert, arguably, Joyce’s syntactical parsimony, as explored in Dubliners (written 1904, published 1914)23 to conjure the brown rows of Georgian terraces and their dismal drawing rooms, can be regarded as the textual equivalent of Sickert’s ‘leaden’ palette (Tickner 2000: 12). Yet Joyce’s technique, it must be recalled, was applied to the production of what he called ‘epiphanies’ – a secularized term for the highly subtle climactic moments of his fiction.24 The epiphany should not be construed as some transcendental, esoteric or quasi-religious happening. On the contrary, the zone of epiphany, in Joyce, is located strictly in the horizon of the secular and mundane – the ‘sudden . . . manifestation’ takes place in the midst of the ordinary, the uneventful, when what is daily ignored or dismissed as random and vulgar suddenly becomes altered by ‘the most delicate and evanescent moments’ (Joyce 1977: 188; in Tindall 1959: 10).25 Returning to London in 1905, Sickert settled in Camden Town, a northern district of the city, then populated by casual labourers, migrant Irish ex-patriates and casual sex workers. The painter embraced the shady milieu of post-Victorian Cockney ‘low-life’ with a dark delight, immersing himself in a realm of sublet townhouses, tenements and basement flats (Tickner 2000: 1; Capet 2007). Camden, for Sickert, doubled as a symbolic environment: as well as a factual site, it represented a psychological space, a richly layered aesthetic ‘context’ within which the painter could realize his novel form of ‘generic, grim realism’ (Moorby 2007) with more conviction. His oeuvre’s ‘squalid’ and ‘sordid’ reputation (Shone 1988;

32   P HOTOGRAPHIC REALISM

Fry 1911 in Tickner 2000; Tickner 2000: 5, 11; Baron 1976; Prendeville 2000: 40) rests on this period’s creative output, and remains largely attributable to a sequence of interiors worked on in the London district between 1905 and 1911. L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909) (Plate 2) is representative of this period’s ‘dark and uncompromising’ aesthetic (Shone 1988: 40). If the invasive focalization of this imagery derives from Degas26 and the foreshortened angles come from Mantegna – and if the borderline-sleazy anatomy-reveal is inspired by Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866) – the atmosphere of speculative malevolence is all Sickert’s own. The figure troubling the shadows extreme left surveys the bed on which a female figure is splayed: naked, spread-eagled, face awkwardly shielded by elbow. (Motionless too: paralysed with fear or perhaps already dead.) The chamber pot partially visible under the bed does nothing to alleviate the aura of cramped menace but only to inscribe it more fully in the realm of the commonplace.27 Yet this work, as with the entire Camden Town cycle – including La Hollandaise (c. 1906) (Fig. 1.6); Mornington Crescent Nude (c. 1907); Nuit d’été (c. 1906); The Camden Town Murder, or, What Shall We Do for the Rent? (c. 1908) – is structured according to a composition of discrete pictorial accessories, the most prominent being the iron bedstead (Shone 1988: 36). Often possessing more salience than the figure lying on its grimy mattress, Sickert’s leitmotif is flanked by looming

FIGURE 1.6  Walter R. Sickert, La Hollandaise (c. 1906). Oil on canvas (51.1 × 40.6 cm). Tate Britain.

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   33

wardrobe (tallboy or dressing table) and mirror, and surrounded by the ubiquitous ‘diapered’ wallpaper (Tickner 2000: 5). Amorphous items of clothing lie strewn about the floor. A (fully clothed) male figure – the antagonist of the piece – as seen in the principal works, is implied by his absence in others. By way of its enigmatic title, the painting references a topical episode, namely, the murder of prostitute Emily Dimmock,28 found with her throat cut in her Camden Town lodgings on 12 September 1907 (Tickner 2000: 6; Prendeville 2000: 40–1). Inspired by the sensationalist press editorials, the painter embarked on a project about the homicide. Reimagined through the reported details, he set about visualizing the crime scene in a series of noir paintings now collectively referred to as the Camden Town Murder pictures (Tickner 2000: 1) which, as Prendeville observes, prescribe a forensic viewpoint that ‘mingles aestheticism with prurience’ (Prendeville 2000: 40).29 Reports of the painter’s obsessive search for the perfect location to contain his notional tableaux are both disturbing and entertaining. ‘I failed to appreciate the significance of this grisly chamber,’ one companion recalled. ‘All I saw was a forlorn hole, cold, cheerless [while] he saw the contre-jour lighting that he loved, stealing in through a small single window, clothing the poor place with light and shadow, losing and finding itself again on the crazy bed and floor. Dirt and gloom did not exist for him; these four walls spoke only of the silent shades of the past, watching us in the quiet dusk’ (Lilly in Tickner 2000: 18). Detailed analysis of Sickert is warranted because of the significant role his work plays in Billingham’s artistic development; but it is also crucial for the simple reason that the artist’s early engagement with the Camden Town Group’s impresario provided the catalyst for the location of his aesthetic objectives within and in relation to the British tradition. Billingham says: There’s a link to the past. He [Sickert] wanted to paint everyday British life. And some of the objects and furniture, they were what I knew growing up, so there’s an identification with that. There’s a certain familiarity there. I used to sleep in a bed like that when I was a kid. The dressing-table . . . the wallpaper. The furniture is very similar to what I remember as a kid. (2018)

During the year he shared the flat with his father, at some point, Billingham began to reimagine the domestic situation as refracted through a Sickertian prism. ‘I was probably, in my own way’, he reflected later, ‘trying to objectify or make sense of a surreal situation’ (Billingham 2013). Specifically invoking the ‘motif of the nude on the bed’ in this connection, Billingham suggests that the framework of the figure in the enclosed interior functioned as a generative form for him, paralleling a structural mode of exploring the existential reality of ‘Ray on bed in dark window lit room’.

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Referring specifically to Sickert’s palette, Billingham observes: ‘The earth colours reminded me, or they had the same atmosphere as what it was like in Ray’s room. You know, the colours were very similar. But, sometimes in a Sickert, you get a bit of warmth . . . like a stroke of red, or orange . . . and I saw that in Ray’s room as well’ (2018). And although the incongruity might perhaps be disarming, he insists nevertheless, that ‘Even though it was a tower block . . . it was a room in a tower block, it still had the same atmosphere to me’ (2018). Is there more relevance here than the filling of a compositional template with conveniently available subject matter? Billingham’s early epiphany (which only gradually materialized with the development of the black-and-white photographs) involved the tacit realization that something fundamental about his father’s lived reality was inadvertently disclosed in conjunction with Sickert – a process that can perhaps be explained technically as the indirect imprint of that sense of presence and protracted duration, later acknowledged in the Camden Town series, onto the photographic surface, in a manner that not only empirically testifies to the living reality of his father’s withdrawal from the world and the dreary cycle of his solipsism but also intuitively (and yet very, very subtly) to his own participation in that existential experience (Billingham 2018). ‘When Richard was living with his father’, Julian Germain (who met the artist for the first time shortly after this) says, ‘I think he was especially moved to scrutinise him for practical reasons (he needed a subject) and for much more complex personal reasons. .  .  . I think the motivation was personal rather than “documentary”.’30 There is of course, as others have recognized, minimal awareness of the photographer in this work (Collins 2018). ‘I don’t think he took any notice,’ Billingham confirms. ‘Or if he did it was probably that he was pleased I was in the room with him’ (Adams 2016: 2). Yet it is obvious that this is entirely different to the generic illusion (in Degas, for instance) that the figure ‘in the room is unaware of the man in the room’ (Bell 2018: 22). Rather, viewing these photographs today it’s evident that they were created to explore a relational situation, a phenomenon registered without awareness of the artistic status of the resultant imagery. ‘There was a darkroom etc. at Bournville College of Art where I did the Foundation course,’ Billingham says, ‘and a technician processed my film there. I would make my own prints (quite badly) . . . I wasn’t interested in making perfect prints, as long as I could see the image I didn’t really care.’31 Billingham intended to elaborate the theme further in ‘imaginary’ paintings, and he processed the experience with only a gradual awakening of the aesthetic aspects of the construct; but ultimately nothing (or very little) of this initial project was to materialize in any usable form. But this project, it is necessary to emphasize, was not a portrait of his father. Yet it is precisely this unawareness, or perhaps, to put it slightly differently, this absence of aesthetic self-consciousness that, paradoxically, gives this body of work its singular and enduring artistic value. These images, to repeat, are not

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   35

portraits. Distinguishing between the generic portrait and the kind of exploratory investigative approach that motivated his early photographic practice, Billingham suggests that he was using the camera as an apparatus to examine something deeper; and what he was searching for, because less universal and more personal, more experiential perhaps, cannot be adequately captured by conventional representational techniques. Seeing the figure alone in the room comes with the immediate awareness that he is not alone. Is another more subtle, if less visible, presence not inscribed vanishingly into the space of these photographs? The father is in the room with the son who takes the picture. Billingham however repeatedly claims that what he perceived through the lens was not his father, but an abstract thing, an anonymous figure in an interior (Billingham 2018). ‘I see them formally,’ Billingham insists of the photos. ‘The good ones .  .  . I look at as “works” or “pieces” or whatever’ (Another 2011). And despite obvious concerns with content, the artist still holds to the exclusively formal motivation of these images: ‘it doesn’t matter about the subject,’ he states (Saatchi Gallery 2000). Yet, to speak about the work in these abstract terms, particularly regarding the subject matter, seems esoteric, strangely unsympathetic, almost cold; indeed, he has more than once distinguished between seeing his family in the ordinary way and perceiving them according to a (necessarily distancing) photographic perspective. Discussing the representation of parents in the catalogue essay for Who’s Looking at the Family? Val Williams cites photographer Larry Sultan’s reflection on the initial photographs of his father executed with the unambiguous intention to create a portrait; but seeing the resultant prints precipitated a surprising change of perception (Sultan 1992). It was no longer possible, Sultan says, to continue to regard the images as portraits in any conventional sense; for the more he looked at the photos, the more he became aware of an implicit effort to ‘recreate’ his father. This change of perspective is described as a paradoxical, almost instinctual, role reversal: ‘like a parent with an infant’, he remarks, ‘I had the power to observe him knowing that I would not be observed myself ’ (Sultan in Williams 1994: 38). Under this aspect – what could be termed the ‘filial gaze’ – father–son hegemonies, exchanged for the fraction of a second it took to take the shot, are crystallized in the print; but this process of (what Martin Amis [Amis in Thomas 2000] calls) filial inversion, ‘has more to do with love than sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness’ (Sultan in Williams 1994: 41).

Richard in Sunderland When he completed the foundation course in Birmingham, Billingham applied, without success, to several degree programmes in universities all over the UK.

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Eventually, following an interview organized by telephone, he was offered a place in Sunderland University (one of the few institutions, ironically, for which he hadn’t completed an official application) (Billingham 2018). So, he left Cradley Heath in the autumn of 1991, having arranged a transfer with his Kwik Save employers, and relocated to Sunderland to begin his BA in Fine Art. And here everything changed for him. Still committed to pursuing a painting major, as an undergraduate, Billingham retained an innate scepticism of photography, treating the camera as a mere means, an expedient apparatus, with which to visually explore a subject in preparation for a main-study project but without intrinsic aesthetic merit (Billingham 2018; Lingwood 1998a and b; Cotton 2014).32 Yet despite this unenlightened attitude – and his artistic obstinacy – he wasn’t producing many paintings either. Declining requests to bring examples of his work to critique or review – claiming it was ‘unavailable’ – he would volunteer photos and snapshots instead (Collins 2018). It is, however, important to relativize Billingham’s period attitude to photography: ‘most British undergraduate photography courses in the early 1990s’, Charlotte Cotton observes, ‘were not yet offering the professional or theoretical framework for “becoming” a contemporary art photographer’ (Cotton 2014). Billingham, however, now acknowledges a gradual developmental change that occurred in his attitude (and in visual culture more generally) during his undergraduate years in Sunderland; he remembers, for instance, attending a guest lecture by Larry Sultan that included the American photographer’s (now iconic) pictures of his elderly parents in their retirement home in the San Fernando Valley (Billingham 2018); he also acknowledges Sunderland photography specialist Julian Germain’s distinctive analytic approach to the medium, finding his discussion of the formal and aesthetic properties of the photograph more stimulating than the mainstream tendency to treat photography in documentary, technical or editorial terms (Billingham 2018). Uninspired by his new and unfamiliar surroundings, however, Billingham was restless. In the meantime, his father had reunited with Liz (moving back into her flat) and his brother Jason had returned from foster care. Now reunified, the Billinghams were all living in his mother’s Wesley Court flat (Ray’s flat was now empty and the artist stayed there whenever he came home). And despite his strong determination to escape his social inheritance through the ‘passport’ of education, in Sunderland, Billingham experienced a strange counter-magnetism that drew him back to the unstable West Midlands home that had somehow managed to repair itself in his absence (albeit in a precarious way). He revisited Cradley Heath regularly with his camera (Cotton 2014; Adams 2016). ‘When I was in University I didn’t really have much intention of going back and visiting them, but I wanted to take more pictures so that when I was in Sunderland I could do some paintings. It’s like I had a reason to go back because it was part of my work’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 57–8).

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   37

This was no common case of nostalgia but rather a desire driven by the creative impulse to complete an unresolved project. He found he was able to develop some of the negatives made during his foundation year on a larger scale in the darkroom at Sunderland, where he would brush developer emulsion directly onto the photographic paper to achieve ‘handmade’, gestural, painterly effects (Billingham 2013). All kinds of heuristic ‘precarious’ qualities were also inadvertently generated at this stage due to Billingham’s inattentive attitude towards his negatives. Prematurely deteriorating through neglect, these had accumulated various microscopic imperfections – scratches, tiny spots of static and stipple, miniature stochastic abrasions and occlusions – that compromised the transparency of the print. ‘I didn’t take care of my negatives early on because I never considered them important. Somebody spilled a pint over a lot of them once and I said: “Don’t worry about it” . . . But it did give me an idea’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 58). Amplified on the photographic surface, these occlusions doubled as impressionistic, atmospheric effects. Photographic clarity wasn’t part of Billingham’s design, so he embraced these unintentional effects as indicative of the hand-made, organic qualities associated with a painterly, materialist aesthetic. Back in the studio, the prints were subjected to further maltreatment: their surfaces were ‘spattered’ and daubed with visceral slashes of paint and random stabs of pigment in a neo-expressionist assault reminiscent of Arnulf Rainer (see the latter’s self-portrait Bereavement 1970); he would also crease, scratch and sometimes tear his prints. He stepped on them as they lay on the ground in the same semi-deliberate way that Bacon disrespected the litter of print material on the floor of his famously untidy studio . . . claiming that ‘chaos breeds images’ (Bacon in Hinton 1988, 2014) or ‘chaos suggests images to me’ (Bacon in Hauser 2014: 44; Domino 1997: 98; Billingham in Lingwood 1998a: 58). ‘I was [merely] trying to find ways of bringing my paintings and photographs together,’ Billingham told James Lingwood. I was thinking that if I did show photographs in galleries or museums, I wanted them large. And I’d have to find some way of making them look like paintings, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to justify putting them up. I also thought of exhibiting paintings beside photographs, which was one of the reasons why I started putting paint on them – sort of abusing the image, eroding, wearing it away a bit. (IN LINGWOOD 1998a: 58)

The indistinctness of Billingham’s developmental work has little in common with the recent preference for the unfocused and the faulty in contemporary screen culture. His early exploration of indistinctness instead relates to an effort to generate paintings from an experimental ‘research’ methodology. The application of expressive techniques to the photographs, for instance, although it may accentuate the materiality of the surface, is not specifically intended to

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compromise the clarity of the medium, or, indeed, even to draw attention to the opacity of the surface. It must be recognized that when he was a student Billingham thought of himself exclusively as a painter. And at this point he was attempting to apply expressive painterly processes directly to the photograph in the attempt to activate the surface and perhaps ‘breed’ a painting from it. By making ‘irrational’ non-signifying marks on the print, he was also to a large extent, if inadvertently, challenging ‘photographic transparency’, that is, the assumption that photographs give direct (visual) access to what they represent (Scruton 1983; Walton 1984; McIver Lopes 2003). Perception of a photograph tends to be defined by seeing through it, focusing, that is, beyond its surface (which is strictly incidental to the photograph’s representational function) and onto the object it represents. Interventions (such as Billingham’s) that affect the materiality of the photographic print, as a result, tend to draw attention to its physical surface, invoking a kind of surface incompatible with realism and more associated with a (modernist) painting surface, considered, that is, as a medium which the eye ‘reads’ as itself the ground of aesthetic experience, and not necessarily in the naïve terms of a picture providing access to the reality it makes visible. But at this stage, Billingham’s hybrid approach can usefully be interpreted as a photographic approximation of Sickert’s painterly practice, specifically, the painter’s emphasis on the activity of the brush and the plasticity of the paint. Up close, Sickert’s paintings are encrusted with layers of ‘stiff-brushed’ impasto, knotted striations of pigment, and ‘painterly hatchings’, producing an enriched, ‘flecked, animated, tactile’ surface (Tickner 2000: 10). Technically referred to as facture, this materialist attention to the physicality of the medium, although informed by his impressionist background, is used in Sickert’s case to motivate an aesthetic reconstruction of the ‘gross material facts of working-class urban space’ (Tickner 2000: 10). Yet reference to facture also explains the sense of presence elicited by this work (and acknowledged above). The relational power of Sickert’s imagery is an effect of the way his practice of facture succeeds in evoking that sense of physical presence Billingham noted in his work; moreover, this presence (of the figure in the room) relates to what Bacon called the ‘tension’ of figuration in Sickert (Sylvester 1987: 59–60) – in other words, that conflictual yet productive relationship between the individually non-signifying marks (tachiste: marks, spots, blotches, stains [2000: 17]) on the tactile surface of Sickert’s canvas and their combined remodelling of forms. The ultimately unresolved struggle between these conflictual orders of representation and their lingering oppositional struggle, evident in the ‘morbidly tactile’ (as Sylvester refers to Auerbach’s paintings [Sylvester in Fuller 1986]) surfaces, is exactly what generates that internal ‘tension’ that Bacon valued in Sickert and applied as a criterion of success in his own painting practice. If the precariousness and awkwardness of Billingham’s early imagery (such as Triptych of Ray) have the indirect effect of enhancing the tactile (and

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   39

tensile) qualities of the medium over its optical features, this seems to have the supplementary and paradoxical consequence of redirecting our awareness back to Ray’s living reality. By ‘return[ing] the onlooker to life more violently,’ Billingham’s occluding facture evokes the specificity of his father’s existential condition more viscerally (Bacon in Domino 1997: 98). Perhaps, as Billingham now asserts, this is due simply to the fact that the indistinctness of the medium makes it look ‘vintage’. However, I think the explanation is more involved and subtle than that. What I’m suggesting here is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s argument in ‘The Image-World’ where she develops a thought experiment that imagines the fascinated excitement occasioned by the hypothetical discovery of a photograph of Shakespeare. ‘This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like,’ she argues. But then she adds, ‘for even if the hypothetical photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein’ (Sontag 1977: 154). Sontag’s reasoning is intuitively convincing. But this is not because a photograph is a relic, as she concludes, but rather because our tacit awareness of the direct reference of photographic representation (its indexical structure) always cognitively overcompensates for its lack of clarity, transcending the signifying surface to relay perception to the reality that has left its causal imprints on that thin surface (no matter how indistinct or precarious the resultant image may be). Yet what remains beyond the surface content of Triptych of Ray, namely, the existence of the subject irreducibly impacted in his specific time and place, exceeds the rendering exactitude of the photographic medium. An interesting reversal occurs here. And this is what the indistinctness of Billingham’s early work, counter-intuitively, perhaps, clarifies: by emphasizing the limitations of the medium it is given more potency as a vehicle of reference, bringing to light what lives beyond the history of an instant. What exactly was Billingham searching for? The questioning physicality of his developing artistic practice – its physical fusion of photographic and painterly approaches – suggests that he was seeking something beyond the limited representational capacity of either paintbrush or lens. Was this because he intuited something in the existential phenomenon (his father in his room) that he believed was amenable to some form of representation yet failed to be adequately conveyed by generic acts of depiction? The analysis of Sickert above argued that the English painter’s restricted palette, a visual equivalent of the parsimony of Joyce’s (contemporaneous) fiction, facilitates moments of epiphany, that is, intimations of suspended ‘revelation’ in the midst of the mundane. The epiphany, to reiterate, is indistinguishably entwined with quotidian experience, an ephemeral moment of sudden numinous manifestation, when random and vulgar ordinary existence flickers with ‘the most delicate .  .  . evanescent’ possibilities (Joyce 1977: 188; in Tindall 1959: 10). Despite its overt ordinariness Billingham’s early work crackles with strangeness.

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It would be reasonable but ultimately mistaken to read this as a defence of ‘defamiliarization’, that is, the view that the function of art is to make the ordinary strange (or uncanny). What is implied here, rather, is that the strangeness of Billingham’s early black-and-white photographs is indistinguishable from their irreducible ordinariness, and this, in part, is an achievement of their severity of formal structure. And even if such structural deprivation (so to speak) is incapable of providing explanation or catharsis, nevertheless, a momentary flicker of transcendence (glimpsed perhaps in all of Billingham’s pictures of his father) is unmistakably – if elusively – manifest in its photographic presence. Methodologically, this could not be further, for instance, from Cartier-Bresson’s images à la sauvette in their aim to capture the ‘decisive moment’ (1952 [2018]). Neither ‘clear nor climactic’ nor, indeed, strictly speaking revelatory, Billingham’s slow method of photographic epiphany accomplishes what could be called the ‘protracted moment’, the consequence of a minute ephemeral present extended until the phenomenon of time solidifies in thin evanescent pieces of tangible matter. The single criterion Billingham observed when pursuing this subject, he told me, was to preserve his father’s dignity (Billingham 2018). And perhaps it is this ethos – which cannot be captured, only suggested, evoked – that continues to inform the work, long after its completion, at an implicit level. Perhaps, indeed, it is this concentrated attitude that, in a way complementary to the sense of presence in Sickert, imbues the 1990–1 photographs of his father with their own distinctive – and no less palpable – presence. What Billingham’s early photographs represent is not reducible to what they depict (a man in a room). This work, in other words, shows something that exceeds its documentary content. Yet what it shows cannot be communicated in any other medium or articulated in any other language. This is because it is shown only as art. Triptych of Ray may expose an existential phenomenon to view, and this may be, as argued, an achievement of its ‘extreme simplicity’ of form and compositional precarity, yet its uncalculated minimalism succeeds also in removing a veil of perception to reveal a paper-thin yet still vivid presence behind it, raw and transient, and still, and there . . .

A SOCIOLOGIST’S PARADISE   41

42 

2

PROLE ART THREAT 1 RAY’S A LAUGH (1996)

They don’t care about anything In 1992 Julian Germain was working as a part-time specialist tutor in the Fine Art faculty of Sunderland University when the intriguing photos of a second-year painting student were brought to his attention. Germain recalls his first meeting with Billingham: ‘Richard arrived in my office with a classic black student portfolio, about A2 sized’ containing gelatin silver (monochrome) photographs mounted on card, ‘mostly images of his dad and perhaps his uncle [Lol] too’. He continues, The prints were made by Richard and the print quality was very much at a student level but the content and the story (that it was his family, that it was clearly an extremely dysfunctional family, that they were for research for his paintings) was undeniably compelling and somewhat at odds with the naïve formality of the presentation. (GERMAIN 2018)2

A tutorial schedule was arranged, and over the following weeks, as he became acquainted with ‘a larger collection of prints’, he started to appreciate ‘narratives unfolding within single rolls of film that were dramatic and quite shocking’. Conscious that this was his immediate family, Germain was cautious but struck nevertheless by the young student’s personality as much as his ‘work ethic’; and, given the social and economic conditions documented in the photographs, quickly realized how impressive it was that he ‘got himself from there’ to university. They began to meet more regularly, and a conversation developed; if the images were disturbing, they were also unexpectedly humorous. ‘There would be laughter as we looked through some of these pictures, and then, when I probed for more detail about what his family was like, what they would make of these pictures,

on numerous occasions Richard said, “They don’t care . . . they don’t care about anything”’ (Germain 2018). Germain encouraged Billingham to explore other camera options. As there were notably fewer colour pictures in the portfolio, he advised him to experiment with automatic-focus point-and-shoot models having better opportunities for responding to the urgency of real-life situations. ‘Once he started using those cameras with auto exposure and flash’, Germain says, ‘that I think was when . . . the work really started to feel more urgent, more contemporary, more new’ (Germain 2018).3 This advice was to prove enormously enabling for the artist. The convenience of the automatic camera not only facilitated the expansion of his technical repertoire but also, and more significantly, accelerated Billingham’s modus operandi. With an apparatus at his disposal that had the capacity to register the temporal energy of life in time with its incidence, the distinctive snapshot métier that was to become the artist’s signature aesthetic began to take shape. Outside the academy Germain was researching the archive of the Press Association in preparation, with Michael Collins, for Brief Encounter, a touring exhibition of appropriated photographic ephemera. Having previously worked with Collins on various commissions for the Telegraph Magazine, Germain invited him to Sunderland to lecture on editorial photography (Collins 2019).4 Before travelling North, he recommended that the editor seek out a certain secondyear painting student who had some ‘unusual photography’ worth viewing in connection with his interest in independent (and amateur) documentary practice (Collins 2018). ‘When Michael saw Richard’s work he quickly confirmed my assessment that this was something that had enormous potential’ (Germain 2018). Following his presentation, Collins inquired after Billingham and was directed to the painting studios where, in the student’s absence, he took the liberty of examining the vacant space. The floor was strewn with ‘piles of very poorly printed B&W photographs’, he remembers, ‘daubed in paint, stuck together . . . one pile was wedged underneath a leg of the easel’ (Collins 2018). Yet despite the evident negligence, he recognized that this work was significant. Although the prints were, he says, ‘at complete variance with most of the photography I had ever seen or knew, not least because it was so technically crap and – mirroring the subject matter – seemed to have been made as a highly dysfunctional response to anguish’ (Collins 2018). The dubious aesthetic, however, was eclipsed by the raw immediacy and stark originality of the work. He recalls its visceral impact: Most of the photographs were of two old men drinking from a glass or a large plastic bottle. Many were versions of the same photograph, printed to varyingly shoddy states. Many had paint brushed on them in seemingly angry or almost graffiti-like strokes. (COLLINS 2018)

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Later, Billingham arrived carrying two portfolios and showed Collins an ugly sequence of his drunken Uncle Lol (Ray’s brother) consuming chicken and progressively slathering mouth, chin and cheeks in mustard: ‘They were close-up photographs,’ Collins recalls, ‘and there seemed both a sense of complicity – doing whatever it is they were doing together – and pathos’. They evoked ‘a range of emotions: sympathy and empathy, pity and suspicion, concern and doubt. What was going on and why?’ (Collins 2018). The student was reticent. All he’d commit to when discussing his work was that ‘this was his uncle and they were “having a laugh”’ (Collins 2018). And the editor quickly realized that further interrogation would be insensitive. Wondering aloud if he had considered working in colour, Billingham got him to drive to his lodgings and, while Collins waited (with Germain) in the car outside, fetched two Kwik Save carrier bags of ‘Tripleprint wallets’ packed with 10 × 15 cm ‘drugstore’ snapshots (and their negatives) which he entrusted to his patrons; and, with the stash of ‘enprints still in batches of the 36 exposed images’, they returned to Germain’s house in Weardale (about 40 km west of Sunderland). ‘That was quite a weekend,’ Germain recalls. ‘Michael and I looking through everything several times and we were completely bowled over. Excited, moved, troubled, shaken. Of course we were responding to both content and aesthetics’ (Germain 2018). ‘These prints’, Collins adds, were ‘what turned out to be Ray’s a Laugh’.

Ray’s a Laugh Published in 1996 by Swiss Press Scalo, Ray’s a Laugh is a 99-page photobook.5 Not counting the three photographs on flyleaf and endpapers, the publication comprises forty-one landscape-aspect double-page plates; the remaining eleven photographs are portrait-aspect and, half the size of the double-spreads, printed one per page. The sequence is punctuated by five blank pages with two portrait photographs printed recto – and two verso – on either side of these blanks. Hardbound in functional brown-paper (with darker brown text) the dustjacket features a blurred, slightly grotesque, close-up snapshot of the protagonist repeated from the inside sequence (RAL #37 pp. 68–69 Plate 3) with the title inscribed in nasty white stretched sans-serif italics along the lower margin.6 Measuring 28.5 by 21.5  cm, Billingham’s photobook is a medium-format volume. The squarish dimensions suggest the aspect ratio of a vintage television screen. Open, the hardback volume lies flat so that double-page spreads remain visible in their entirety, with no loss of information in the gutter. Walter Keller’s Zurich-based independent publishing company Scalo specialized in contemporary art photography (they published Nan Goldin’s title I’ll be Your

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Mirror in 1996). Keller was Collins’s contact and they met through Gilles Peress, whose photographs of the Bosnian War appeared in the Telegraph Magazine in 1993 (subsequently published by Scalo as Farewell to Bosnia [Peress 1994]). Yet despite its impressive portfolio, which, along with Peress and Goldin, included Robert Frank, Larry Clark, Paul Graham, Richard Prince, Boris Michailov and Jim Goldberg, the publishers went into receivership in the mid-2000s – but not before releasing a second (paperback) edition of Ray’s a Laugh in 2000. Encompassing a six-year period (from 1990–6) the main body of Ray’s a Laugh was photographed in his mother’s flat on the seventh floor of Wesley Court housing block (Chesshyre 2001). When Richard was away at university (1991–4), his father moved back in with Liz, and his younger brother (Jason, then aged seventeen) returned from foster care to live with his parents. Five photographs from the earlier period when Billingham was living with his father in Addenbrooke Court (see Chapter 1) in 1990–1 are interpolated into the sequence, three of which, RAL #16 pp. 30–31 (Plate 4); RAL #17 (aka Untitled 1990) p.33 (Plate 1); RAL #33 pp. 60–61 (Plate 5),7 are among his very first colour photographs (later used as references for his debut feature film Ray & Liz [2018]) (Billingham 2018) and were taken in Ray’s former flat. These are generally more austere and reflective studies than the later snapshots in Ray’s a Laugh. One of them (#17) incorporates an incidental self-portrait: as Ray turns toward his son, the artist’s blurred cameo appears in the oval mirror, the camera masking his face. Carefully controlled compositions and painterly interior studies are combined in Ray’s a Laugh with spontaneous, opportunistic snapshots. Some are taken with an Olympus OM 10 SLR 35 mm camera (#5 pp. 8–9; #6 pp. 10–11 [EE: 7, 8]: exterior shots) which requires more time and careful attention, while others are taken with what Billingham repeatedly (and summarily) refers to as ‘crappy cameras’ – that is, automatic unbranded models with plastic lenses, viewfinder and flash, which ricochet white light around the interior space (##29–30, pp. 54–55 [EE: 30]; Billingham 2018), creating stark and dramatic, semi-surrealist shadows. ‘Back then you had to have a flash if you photographed indoors,’ the artist explains. ‘It gave the pictures a certain look’ (Billingham 2018). And yet these so-called ‘crappy’ cameras are the perfect apparatus for apprehending Billingham’s indecisive moments of circumstantial verité. Another consequence of flash photography is the red-eye phenomenon (caused by light reflected from the retina), the bane of amateur photographers; and these vintage imperfections (among many other standard technical deficiencies) are perceivable in several pictures (principally the animal portraits #36 pp. 66–67 [EE: 36]; #45 pp. 84–85 [EE: 45]; and #50 pp. 92–93 [EE: 49]). Billingham was also relying on inexpensive, frequently out-of-date film stock; and he had the subsequent exposures processed at the cheapest pharmacy. Of one baleful image of his mother smoking moodily in her nook by the window (#41, pp. 76–77 [EE: 41]), the artist comments, ‘The curtains aren’t that red, that

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table’s not that blue’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 56).8 Yet these conventionally ‘defective’ amateur qualities, far from depreciating the artistic value of Ray’s a Laugh, paradoxically, contribute to its distinctive and precise aesthetic appeal.

An unconventional photobook The conversations that led to Ray’s a Laugh began in autumn 1993. Early in these discussions it became evident that the book form was the most effective vehicle for this unhappy family album (Germain 2018). Yet the collaborators (Collins, Germain and Billingham) also agreed that the energy of this exceptional body of work – whatever form it ultimately assumed – would be diminished if obliged to conform to the conventions of the art-book genre. Preliminary meetings with Billingham convened around the ambition of working exclusively with images; not only were his photographs considered sufficiently legible in the absence of exegesis, they were regarded as more powerfully emotive when unsupported by textual mediation. This involved subversion of the standard Title Page | Introduction | Critical Essay | Pictures | Conclusion | End Material bibliographic format, marking a decisive departure from the tradition of discursive aesthetics (Germain 2018).9 Were they prepared for this radical strategy? It certainly led to unanticipated complexities for the artist (and apprehension on the part of the editors) about managing such a nonconventional reading experiment. What grammatical criteria govern the legibility of pictorial syntax? Initial stages of the editing process required engaging with an expansive spectrum of photographic material (copiously supplied by Billingham who was, at this point, becoming highly prolific); and it quickly became clear that the effective finessing of this material would involve more than a professional survey and curation of a collection of pictures. Acknowledging that the unique reading experience motivated by Billingham’s images required the development of an innovative method of combination, a method capable of achieving sequential comprehension while maintaining the intensity of the visceral content; yet this imagery resisted articulation into obvious beginning, middle and end sequences. Indeed, imposition of chronological, consecutive or consequential narrative patterns could jeopardize the spontaneity and specificity of individual photographs (Cotton 2014). The prolonged editing process was undertaken with the criterion of sustaining comprehension without compromising the sporadic visual energy of the pictures, a challenge which compelled the collaborators to reimagine new structures of pictorial legibility. Although motivated by different (and sometimes conflicting) viewpoints, all three protagonists were unanimous that this work required sensitive managing in order to avoid being miscast in the sensationalist reality category. During the weekends of 1995, Collins was exploring trial juxtapositions of Billingham’s images on the photocopiers of the empty Telegraph office. ‘I’d push the desks . . .

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out of the way,’ he remembers, ‘and lay the sheets out on the floor, going back and forth until I had a sequence that I thought was worth sticking together’ (Collins 2019). These Xerox copies were folded in half and bound using tape and glue into A4-scale prototypes (‘maquettes’).10 The editor was, by his own admission, becoming ‘increasingly obsessed’ with the syntactic effects generated by different sequences of images. Admitting that during his Telegraph period this was the ‘most important work he was doing in photography’ (Collins 2019) his ambition for Billingham was influenced by modes of autobiographical discourse. Parallels with Tobias Wolff ’s This Boy’s Life (1989),11 and Mikal (younger brother of Gary) Gilmore’s then recently published memoir Shot in the Heart (1995), enabled him to perceive the photobook within that testimonial idiom, as a silent autographic exclamation, an ‘eloquent expression of the inarticulate’ (Collins 2018) – pictures of a life exposed in its ineffability. Recognizing that Billingham’s pictures confounded the conventions of documentary realism, they began to reconceive the project, paradoxically, as a species of literature (Germain 2018). As Billingham seemed to be ‘turning [Hungarian-American documentary photographer] Cornell Capa’s notion of the humanitarian ‘concerned photographer’ inside out . . . [our] initial ambition was to make a novel with photos and the original intent was to shape and scale the book accordingly’ (Germain 2018). The internalized tension of Billingham’s domestic scenes reminded Germain of the episodic texture of John Healy’s account of alcoholism and vagrancy The Grass Arena (1988). And in its final form, Billingham’s ‘book of hours’ (Searle 1999) captures a related experience of temporality, an experience Lisa Baraitser has identified (in a different context) as ‘enduring time’. This refers to patterns of compulsive behaviour (often shared or distributed among family members) that develop in response to empty transience. The oppressive feeling, for instance, ‘of waiting, of bearing the state of nothing happening’, inspires escapist practices of adaptation that can accelerate into addictive and self-destructive tendencies (Baraitser 2013).12 Ray Billingham’s pursuit of obliteration, reconfigured again and again in his son’s book of hours, is explicable in relation to this experience of enduring time. When Collins brought the photocopied folios to Germain and Billingham, they scrutinized them, ‘tearing out sheets, replacing [and] repositioning them etc.’ (Collins 2019). ‘Eventually’, Collins recalls, ‘the three of us met in a village hall [in Weardale] to spread out the short-listed photographs on trestle-tables and to decide upon the final content and order for the book’ (Collins 2018). Potential montages developed incrementally, Germain recalls, through a process of spreading ‘double pages alongside each other so the whole book could relatively easily be viewed and then putting it together to see how it felt as each page was turned’ (Germain 2018). At the end of this endeavour Collins was dissatisfied. However, his later claims that he ‘Unilaterally’ decided ‘not to follow their instructions for the [final, agreed] maquette’ (Collins 2019) and independently

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‘revised the selection and sequencing’ (2018) have been robustly (to say the least) rejected by Billingham and Germain.13 Reflecting on his role in the editing process, Germain doesn’t recall any serious disagreement. ‘Of course’, he concedes, ‘each of us had our own opinions. . . . [But] It just felt like a thorough process’ (Germain 2018). As far as he’s concerned, at the time, everyone – including the artist – was satisfied with the final achievement; and his position remains that the task concluded ‘amicably’ and with consensual agreement: any subsequent alterations were supplementary, not ‘substantial, controversial or dramatic’ (Germain 2020). Ultimately, the consensus was that Billingham’s photobook be ‘quiet in appearance, measuring approximately 7  ×  9 inches with a black and white portrait of Ray on the cover’ (Collins 2018). So the artist and editors were (initially at least) dismayed when they discovered that Scalo had (without consultation) altered the proposed dimensions of the book, changed the agreed cover image and cropped the prints carelessly, in Collins’s opinion, to ‘opportunistically’ ‘hype its appearance’ (Collins 2019, 2018).14 In her essay for the (2014) Errata re-edition of Billingham’s photobook, Charlotte Cotton goes so far as to claim that Keller deliberately sensationalized the publication, adding the Robert Frank blurb to make it look even more ‘vulgar and biting in its sentiment’ (Cotton 2014). Collins remains incensed by the publisher’s lurid design, which in his opinion, is a ‘travesty’, a criticism, to be clear, which pertains exclusively to Scalo’s design and repackaging of Billingham’s photobook and not the final, agreed, sequence of photographs (Collins 2018). ‘I was equally shocked,’ Germain says, ‘by the way something we’d worked on with such care and in such incredibly fine detail (we thought that we’d visualized it perfectly and that our design was agreed!) was so swiftly altered in appearance’ (Germain 2020). It should be unnecessary to insist that, regardless of their subsequent mediation, the photographs of Ray’s a Laugh remain individually, collectively and irreducibly the artist’s work.15 As creator, Billingham’s primary motive was pragmatic: the construction of a coherent optical arc from a decisive selection of the most successful pictures of his family, displayed, without expository judgement, in an impactful yet sensitive light. Eclipsing the confessional impulse, this ambition, for the artist, encapsulated all aspects of the ‘content, colour, form’, indeed, the entire ‘ebb and flow and balance of the book as a whole’ (Germain 2018). Billingham now acknowledges that ‘the book dummy’ originally submitted to the publishers ‘wasn’t fully resolved’ (Billingham 2018). Although disappointed with the publication at the time, the artist is philosophical about it today. If Scalo printed the pictures as they appeared in the prototype (inconsistently, as it happened, some images with the tell-tale white Xerox borders included, others at full-bleed) then perhaps it was the destiny of the book to appear dysfunctional in precisely this way. Addressing the cover-image controversy Billingham suggests that it was altered (with the collaborators’ agreement) strictly ‘because it looked better’. In fact, he’s become quite critical of the original black-and-white cover image, dismissing it

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now as ‘a bit literal’. Apropos the prototype – a home-made binding of photocopies taped together in a black A4 sketchbook with the black-and-white portrait of Ray taped to the cover – he comments: You put the caption ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ over the top, and you’ve got a picture of an old man with a drink in his hand, laughing, it’s just too literal. It seemed clichéd to me. (BILLINGHAM 2018)

For the cover of Ray’s a Laugh Scalo opted for a blurry close-up of the protagonist selected from the interior sequence. Recalling the magical realist scene in Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996), where the relapsed junky Renton shoots up and subsides into a shallow grave of red velvet, the cover image shows Ray, embedded in a cushion of red, eyes closed, grinning the lop-sided, gummy laugh of the title (RAL #37 Plate 3). According to everyone involved, when the artist suggested the title, it was a eureka moment. Yet, in a gesture of self-effacement typical of Billingham, the statement on the back attributes the title to his brother. Riffing on the idiom ‘raise a laugh’, punning, that is, on the comedic capacity to generate humour is obvious, but beside the point (the available pun was already used for the popular domestic sit-com hosted by Ted Ray and broadcast on BBC radio from 1949 to 1961). The semantic ambiguity of the title, which the artist cheekily appropriates for his own dysfunctional sit-com, sarcastically parallels the photobook’s ambivalent content. And perhaps the intention is to state that his father was funny (as Jason’s ingenuous quip seems to suggest); but such naivety is immediately exploded by what’s exposed to view inside. Is the title intended in that case to insinuate that his father is pathetic? A loser alcoholic who cannot even get up from a chair when he’s pissed; a sad senile old scarecrow that no one notices even when he collapses and breaks the toilet seat; a demented ghost haunting the seventh floor of a Black Country council estate? Is this material funny ‘ha-ha’ or funny ‘absurd’? But the low comedy of Ray’s a Laugh is stopped dead by its severe realism. Reminiscent of Larkin’s infamous family poem ‘This Be the Verse’ (‘They fuck you up your mum and dad . . .’) the ‘structure of feeling’ of Billingham’s book is similarly ‘purged of [all] sentimentality’ (Williams 1968: 9; Lovell 1972 in Lovell 1996: 159; Ricks 2012: 43). A seam of dark inevitability runs through this human comedy even at its most junk prosaic, transgressive and melodramatically abject. Any hint of tragic elevation is however subverted by cruel humour; like a Beckett play, any temptation to smile is darkened by a content pitiless in its bitter fidelity to the real. Billingham’s theatre of cruelty, Adrian Searle remarks, ‘fascinates and appals and makes us laugh’ at the same time (Searle 2000, my emphasis); but, weirdly, and again curiously like Beckett, this tragicomedy seems funniest where it is most appalling and terrible only in its brief moments of light relief.

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Exploration of space: The domestic interior The series from which Ray’s a Laugh derives is best regarded as an extension of the figure and interior construct. A distinctly Sickertian approach continues to inform this work (which, at this stage, was explicitly conceived as preparatory research for a hypothetical painting project). Even if motivated by Billingham’s identification with Sickert’s grim fin-de-siècle realism, this work however takes the exploration of ‘an undeceived, disillusioned vision’ (Graham-Dixon 1996: 220) of domesticity to new and more extreme levels of engagement. Tracking through his mother’s flat, a sense of its interior layout gradually materializes as we are immersed in an environment of madly eclectic rooms. Intensely patterned wallpaper and grimy carpets provide the setting for salvage furniture of all shapes and sizes: slime-green flaccid sofa and seaside deckchairs, an assortment of motely drawers and dressers, re-covered footstools, cushions and mothball blankets; metal bedframes and bedsit lockers and low, functional Formica tables covered with cans, boxes, cups, ashtrays and miscellaneous cutlery; and bouquets of fake plastic flowers on faux-woodgrain cabinets, shelves overflowing with a particoloured audience of dolls, ceramic figurines, kitsch trinkets and curios (and, camouflaged among them, a live, spitting cat); harlequin masks and creepy Pierrot heads stare from the (stained) walls among school photos, tinselframed mirrors and pictures of kittens (and tigers). Duct-taped vacuum cleaner and abysmal mop bucket are not just tokens of domestic squalor. A poster of Dalí’s Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937) reappears in different locations augmenting the domestic geometries with a four-dimensional paranoiac logic that seems somehow less puzzling than the crazy jigsaw bric-a-brac overlaying every surface and filling every available space of this interior. The photo on the flyleaf spread (RAL #1 pp.0 EE: 3) is an aerial (or high-angle) view of the humdrum townscape of Cradley Heath (deserted, apart from two denim-clad pedestrians cruelly divided by the stitches of the spine). Taken from the window of the seventh-floor flat – the tell-tale shadow of the tower block is visible below – it is, in itself, a deceptively simple image, the directionality of the sweep and scarp of the road, with its feint tyre-track tracery, contrasts with the weird emptiness of the streets. Because of its placement and perspective, this photo functions as an ‘establishing shot’ in the sequence, referring, obviously, to the narrative device of beginning a sequence with an encompassing view of the location in which the subsequent action will occur (a vista frequently identified with the perspective of the characters). For instance, in the British New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s, a working-class realist tradition of representation with which Billingham’s photography has been associated (Adams 1997: 39; Home 2000: 45; Cashell 2017), the establishing shot has a peculiar specificity of function that has been analysed by Higson (1996). PROLE ART THREAT   51

In the paradigmatic Kitchen Sink realism developed in the Woodfall films16 the panoramic landscape or townscape scene, as well as introducing a spatial or situational context to support the elaboration of story, must also, to a certain extent related to the kindred naturalism associated with the genre, exceed narrative. ‘Each of these location shots’, Higson explains, requires to be ‘read as a real historical place which can authenticate the fiction’ (1996: 134; original emphasis). Yet a disruptive tension is discovered in these – almost motionless – pictorial moments of film that, he believes, encourages viewers to ‘investigate’ them more intently, ‘against the grain of the narrative’ (1996: 141). These moments, he concludes, entail ‘a particular mode of looking as observation, a belief that we can see the real, in images which document the social condition of the people who inhabit the landscape’ (1996: 141). Billingham, by engaging the convention of the establishing shot,17 admittedly motivates such an externalized viewpoint prior to providing privileged access to the interior of the flat, but ultimately only to have that convention reversed. Overlapping with the window frame, his introductory image positions the viewer at the apex of the visual field but only because it coincides with the view from behind the window, looking out at the town below. Subverted in this manner, the atypical establishing shot of Cradley Heath – the town in which the action is located – has a very different effect to the standard establishing shot (caricatured by Higson as ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’).18 Here the impact is to motivate the feeling of already being inside the claustrophobic flat. Perhaps it is a stretch to argue that, in its sense of enclosure, this includes the supplementary connotation of the protagonist’s agoraphobia; what it is feasible to maintain is that, far from accommodating a ‘position of visual mastery’ (Higson 1996: 153), Billingham’s inaugural zero-shot generates, instead, the compulsive impulse to escape and embrace the freedom the exterior space appears to promise.19 The clarity and perspective of this urban scene, in another key reversal of convention, when visualized from this high-angle, contrasts sharply with the riotous chaos of the interior space. Connection with British New Wave realism, incidentally, carries connotations of the ‘emancipation narrative’ (Hebdige in Dave 2006: 88) within Billingham’s oeuvre, that is, the impulse to escape the social space allegorized in the oppressive, claustrophobia-inducing images of Ray’s a Laugh. Before we properly enter that realm, the first picture says: the ‘action’ takes place here, in Cradley Heath in the West Midlands. But it says, more specifically, you are already inside the space behind this window, with Billingham’s parents, in their ‘comfortless flat’ (Hebdige 1979: 88; Delaney 1959: 7),20 on the seventh floor of a Riddins Mound high-rise council estate. Now we’re introduced to its inhabitants. In #2 (pp. 1–2 EE: 4) (Fig. 2.1) Elizabeth (aged forty-two, left, standing) is preparing to leave, while Ray (aged sixty-three, right, seated) fixates on the bottle in the foreground of the picture. Richard Cork,

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FIGURE 2.1  Richard Billingham, RAL #2 [EE Plate 4] (1996).

in an astonishingly perceptive review, observed that ‘when seen together’ Ray and Liz ‘offer a superb study in physical contrasts’ (Cork 2003: 36). And in this image the heavy tension of their relationship is palpable. In blue overcoat, carrier bag in crook of right arm, cig in heavy-ringed fist, with hair assertively tucked behind ear, Liz, like a grotesque figure in a dark fairy tale, warns man in armchair not to drink, as he gazes longingly at the fat dented plastic container (already open) of dark brown ale on the table between them, awaiting the moment when she leaves so he can get stinking drunk. The low camera angle makes the door framing Liz – like the matriarch in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Hallström 1993) – appear too small for her physique. A 1993 calendar with a picture of the Taj Mahal hangs on the wall, its tranquil symmetrical perspectives an ironic anticipation of the dysphoric mise en scène that will unfurl through the ensuing pages. Next: Jason (aged seventeen) gets his intro (#3 pp. 4–5 [EE: 5]) (Plate 6), left of spread. Michael Tarantino suggests that Billingham’s younger brother is the most enigmatic character in the book; but this is not because he plays a minor or supporting role in the tragicomedy (Tarantino 2000: 86). But it could be argued, rather, that the project was motivated to a certain extent by the artist’s concern for his ‘unruly’ brother. Remember Jason is the one who thinks Ray is such a laugh (but, as printed on the back cover, adds that he doesn’t want to end up like him). One of the original photocopied prototypes prepared for the publishers, in fact, included a typed official document on headed paper from the Department of Child Protection regarding his younger brother’s foster care placement (Billingham 2018). The documentation contains a passport-sized photo of Jason aged nine or ten and details how he was taken into social care following an incident around 1987 when he was discovered sleeping rough in the shed of a friend’s house.21 This archival material was omitted from the final draft which meant that readers only had the artist’s brief statement on the back of the book

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to testify to this motivation. Billingham’s concern for his brother related to the fact that Jason had benefited from his foster placement; he was attending school and preparing for his A Levels but, when reunited with his biological parents, lost interest and dropped out. In this photograph, a topless Jason stands beside his father (right, also topless) in front of a sky-blue interior wall. Holding a measuring jug filled with dark brown gravy-like fluid, Ray’s tipping the vessel slightly so that it’s almost spilling from the spout. This is his father’s evening soupçon of homebrew scooped from a large drum he kept beside his bed. Despite the fascinating hereditary replication of the two bodies (a counterpoint to the physical contrasts of the previous image), as in Diane Arbus’s celebrated photograph Identical Twins, Roselle NJ (1967), the shared physiognomy and parallelism of physique only appears to render the differences more expressively evident. But the slightly repulsive ontological displacement in this Gemini equation, as Tarantino comments, is simply an effect of … ‘age’ (Tarantino 2000: 89).22 The age differential is viscerally inscribed in the two bodies. And what is it that’s inscribed in this physicality? Nothing, Tarantino says, but the ‘past, present and future of this family’ (2000: 89). Although the peak adolescent frame is delineated with contours of distinct musculature, its future form is foreshadowed in the sagging and stooped structure of the elderly body, rib cage visible through the flaccid skin, the hair ash-grey and frazzled, the neck scraggy with wattle. We see time exteriorized in the somatic grain of this naked torso, time extruded in its physical traces, marks and lines, which yet conveys more inexorably just what the (young) body will inevitably endure through its severe medium. ‘In parents’, David O’Neill reflects in a (slightly) different context, ‘a grown child sees the past, present and future all in one go’ (2018: 42). Domestic animals next. Two dogs sitting on the couch (#4 pp. 6–7 EE: 6) their absurd anthropomorphism expressive of their elevated status in this human comedy: the female Jack Russell/Corgi (?) terrier sitting upright on the tatty cushions (rows of pink teats on display) looks as if she’s watching telly (Sladen 1997; Tarantino 2000: 84) while the other unkempt mongrel perches precariously on the settee, indifferent to Ray, just about visible in the background of the shot, grumbling about in the dark, preparing another drink – his hands, shakily reddish in the recessive darkness. Although most of the drama takes place in Liz’s flat, she (as Charlotte Cotton also notes) only features in thirteen of the shots. Some of these are fragments: her slippered feet (note the scar above the right ankle) in #36 (EE: 36) and a slice of her left arm seen through the kitchen door holding a dustpan in #24 (EE: 25) while dog and cat eye up the carrots and peas spilt all over the lino. Nevertheless, Liz’s imperious presence is implied in almost every picture of the sequence, ‘with pets and possessions often shown closing in on Ray’ (Cotton 2014). Yet apart from the ‘fight scenes’, the portraits of Billingham’s mother

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are among the most sensitive, considered and affectionate images of the book (see Stallabrass 1999; Cashell 2009: 22). Characterized by a formal complexity and almost Islamic density of pattern and texture, these shots are reminiscent of Soviet photographer Alexander Rodchenko’s Portrait of Mother (1924) and reflect Billingham’s mother’s love of pattern (a shared love!). The first close-up of Liz in Ray’s a Laugh is a good example (#18 pp. 34–35 EE: 20). Avoiding direct contact with the lens, her downcast, mascaraed eyes make the mother look demure, almost melancholy, while behind her, a weird audience of Pierrot masks (in displacement of her averted gaze) seem to be peering into the lens through their empty eye sockets. In another – one of the most admired photographs in Billingham’s oeuvre – his mother is absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle (RAL #20 p.39 EE: 22) (Plate 7). Sitting on the couch, bending over the partially completed scene, her head sunk below her shoulders, Liz carefully selects a piece from the tray on her lap. Quickly assuming a certain independence from the series, this remarkable photograph went on to become the most recognizable and iconic of the artist’s career. Acquired by advertising magnate cum art collector Charles Saatchi it was shown (enlarged to 120  ×  80 cm on aluminium) in the Royal Academy Sensation exhibition the following year and has since appeared in several anthologies of contemporary photography. The photograph is included, for example, in Phaidon’s survey of international photographic history The Photo Book (Jeffrey [1997] 2000). Its painterly sensitivity to the fine-grained detail and the complex formal nuances hidden in a random slice of everyday reality is considered exemplary of the general artistic achievement of Ray’s a Laugh. Reviewing Billingham’s debut solo show in the Anthony Reynolds Gallery London (1996) Gilda Williams, for instance, noted the formal inventiveness of the photograph and commended its framing of ‘chaos’ as establishing a compositional ‘grounding which contributes to the work’s instant readability’ (1996: 31). Likewise, Adrian Searle, referring to the artist’s ‘feral hunger for the unregarded moment’, cites the snapshot as a key example of Billingham’s intuitive ability to sense ‘the plenitude of detail in a wretched room’ and somehow conjure a hidden aesthetic order from the anarchy of quotidian reality (Searle 2000). Liz’s print dress’s tortuous patterning looks alive. It seems to have crept off the garment and settled in the tray on her lap. Even the tattoos on her forearms have an arabesque form as if they’ve disseminated from the dress and taken root on her limbs. Now she’s working on the sky. And little pieces of sky, like tiny blue hieroglyphs, lie scattered on the surface beside the partially completed mosaic. The tea cooling in the glass mug and the three cigarette butts in the metal ashtray suggest the passage of time. To the left of the frame, a pack of cigarettes, cobalt blue with the brand signifier in white, SKY, reiterated, once on the front and then again, smaller, on the side, externalizes the private content of her head as she searches for the elusive piece.

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Was curator Jonathan Watkins23 right to characterize this photograph as an image of killing time? It is certainly related to the other habitual ways of relieving boredom registered in the series (compulsive smoking, uncontrolled drinking, binge eating, video games). But the theme of ‘enduring time’ in Billingham, as Outi Remes appreciates, cannot be separated from the concomitant theme of addiction in Ray’s a Laugh: compulsive consumption being a default defence against chronic boredom (Remes 2007b). In Billingham’s early family photography (especially the Ray’s a Laugh cycle) the banality of subject matter is repeatedly exceeded by structure. Identifying again and again, in Eric Santner’s phrase, ‘surplus’ instants of epiphany in the monotonous, mind-numbing ‘fabric of everyday life’ (Santner 2001, in Watson 2004: 31), this photograph of his mother epitomizes this transfiguration, for clearly, here, the banality of the subject is contradicted by an almost infinitesimal complexity of form. Its intricacy of detail elicits a state of fascinated absorption in the viewer that reciprocates the mother’s absorption in her puzzle. This transfiguration of private behavioural states (boredom for example) into moments of experiential fascination could be regarded as the distinguishing achievement of Billingham’s aesthetic, something that differentiates his post-documentary realism from the one-dimensional documentary imperative of the straight ‘humanitarian photojournalist’ (Remes 2007b). The extreme close-up of Liz feeding a blind, new-born kitten with a syringe should also be mentioned in this connection (#49 pp. 90–91 EE: 48). Mothering the minute creature swaddled in a tea-towel in her gigantic arms, she looks up at the lens and her lips peel into a smile revealing a row of nicotine-stained teeth. With this snapshot Billingham captures the evanescent instant when a vulgar slice of everyday life is quietly transfigured by an unexpected epiphany as an afterimage of the Madonna and Child appears in sudden, thin, transparent manifestation. Indeed, the Joycean epiphany, by way of this manifestation, can be compared to a double exposure, where the photographic surface becomes a pathway for another content, as another form crystallizes within its image space. (Incidentally, the tattoos on her arms are legible in this photograph: ‘Jason’ on the left arm and ‘Ray’ on the right.) The centrefold is one of the few unambiguously euphoric scenes of the book. It shows the artist’s parents embracing in enthusiastic abandon in the cramped kitchen space (#27 pp. 50–51 EE: 28) (Fig. 2.2). Right in the middle of the book, amid all the agonistic images of violence, separation, incontinence and abjection, Billingham’s parents come together, lovers temporarily reunited. This is the book’s coup de foudre: A rare moment, perhaps the last, it is nevertheless the centrifugal centre around which all the other images in the text circulate, confirming that, as Nick Hornby observes, Ray’s a Laugh evokes the ‘portrait of a marriage as much as an analysis of social despair or urban alienation . . . [and] . . . this marriage has its moments of calm domesticity and evidently peaceful companionship’ (Hornby 2001: 224).

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FIGURE 2.2  Richard Billingham, RAL #27 [EE Plate 28] (1996).

The majority of pictures in the photobook are of Billingham’s father: Ray falling over, Ray collapsed in the lavatory, Ray sitting on the couch drinking, Ray drinking again and drinking some more (note the flicker-book relationship between #9 and #23), Ray on the couch, eyes closed, a plate of nondescript dinner on his knees, Ray drunk, vacantly peering (at his son) like a zombie with absolutely no recognition in his eyes. In one of the concluding photographs, an injured Ray (he has a bloody nose from a fall or a fist-fight with his wife) is seen reaching up to switch off the light in the toilet (#51, pp. 94–95 EE: 50) (recognizable due to its wallpaper pattern). A closing conceit: light, the condition of possibility of the photographic process – but also of the very modality of the visible itself – is caught suspended on the point of its extinction and brings the sequence to an appropriate conclusion, but not before we get a final glimpse of the townscape through the window of Ray’s former flat – a Murnau-esque grainy quasi-gothic scene of church spire among misty rooftops (#52, pp. 96–97 EE: 51 Fig. 2.3) which is followed by an equally foggy, very early black-and-white reflection of Ray, wraithlike and fading away, in the mirror of his dressing table (#53, pp.98 EE: 52) (Fig. 1.2).

FIGURE 2.3  Richard Billingham, RAL #52 [EE Plate 51] (1996).

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Non-consecutive sequential structure Juxtaposition, in narrative, Roland Barthes argues, is commonly understood in consequential terms. For instance, sequence A followed by B is read ‘B because of A’. ‘Everything suggests,’ Barthes comments, ‘that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by . . .’ (Barthes 1977: 44). The narrative effect of ‘embedding and enveloping’ images in sequence is a left-to-right consecutive development, the lexical default for reading (in Western culture) applied to sequences of images. In such a book, like Billingham’s, this effect is reinforced, of course, through turning the pages – rhythmically with the hands – allowing narrative effects to develop intuitively, connecting the images in sequential, temporal, patterns of consequence and causality. The pictorial grammar of ‘embedding and enveloping’ (Barthes 1977: 118) in Ray’s a Laugh can be regarded as a more sophisticated and confident development of the spatial relationships tentatively explored in Triptych of Ray (analysed in Chapter 1). Yet the structural complexity of the later work is supported by an infrastructural consistency that is sustained (albeit with some significant deviations such as the early photographs taken in his father’s former flat and the nature studies outside the flat) throughout the sequence. Symmetries of pattern, motif and recurring detail, that is, provide relatively stable (if highly contingent) compositional matrices for the convulsive incidents that take place within individual frames. And there is, as with Triptych of Ray, a similar Mobius-strip-like circularity that sometimes subverts the sequential rhythm altogether, undermining and disrupting the linear imperative of reading with looped, recursive patterns of nonverbal legibility, producing a circularity reflexive of the theme: ‘There isn’t really a beginning or an end,’ the artist says, because, ‘My family always stays the same, they watch the same things, they have the same pattern to their lives, they talk about the same things’ (in Lingwood 1998b: 58). Resistance to narrative norms was spoken of above in relation to the editing difficulties of Ray’s a Laugh. In an introduction to Alexander Trocchi’s strange novel Cain’s Book, Tom McCarthy remarks on the author’s eccentric ‘refusal of story’ observing that ‘Narrative in the conventional sense is almost non-existent’ (in Trocchi 1960: v). Apparently Trocchi described the shape of his plot as a ‘landscape’, barren of the customary peaks and troughs of typical storytelling. Characterized by a similar tension between the order of the sequential and the order of the consecutive, Billingham’s photobook has a ‘landscape’ structure comparable to Trocchi’s anti-narrative novel. Although motivated to avoid the random and the discontinuous, the sequence of snapshots in Ray’s a Laugh never completely resolves into a consecutive developmental narrative pattern. Obvious chronological (and temporal) inconsistencies are juxtaposed with moments of unembellished episodic insecurity (such as the snapshot of the thrown airborne

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cat #28 pp. 52–53 EE: 29). Tectonic stability of composition is regularly perturbed by sudden eruptions of pictorial urgency; and even the temporary interludes of tranquillity (in the nature and animal studies for instance) seem threatened by an underlying agitated, if suppressed, internal tension. Although present throughout, specific examples of this non-consecutive sequential structure can be indicated. It is evident, for instance, in the relationship between #42 and #43 (pp. 78–81 EE: 42–43) (Plates 8, 9) where Ray, in incongruous dark green velvet blazer (right), is observing (with vague apprehension) rat (left) clambering out of its vivarium (its pink paws clinging to the glass). On the next page, in reverse orientation, he faces an indifferent (and vaguely contemptuous, even slightly intimidating) bitch sitting on the bed (right). While, pictured from the side, Ray’s facial expression is inscrutable (even grotesque), the harsh black shadow outlining his profile (an effect of the camera flash) against the candy-pink wall reminiscent of the detached shadows around Bacon’s figures from the early 1960s (the flash-effect in this instance exaggerating Ray’s aquiline profile against the in-focus Yorkshire Pudding box making him look like a Punch puppet). The dog, on the other hand, visible from shoulders up, with her Sid Vicious chain, remains coolly uninterested in Ray. The inference, of course, is that, in this microcosmic realm, Ray is an inferior member and has had to learn to be submissive in relation to the more powerful and respected species of the household. Although the human figure is upstanding and therefore dominant (by virtue of pictorial salience) this dominance is reversed not only by the dog’s closer position (at optical centre right) but also by her vaguely anthropoid expression of disrespect. Reflecting the layers of visual alliteration that recur throughout the sequence, several examples of such rich hermetic rhythm can be discovered criss-crossing the pages of Ray’s a Laugh. A case in point, relative to the image just discussed, the two other photos taken in the same interior space with the Bacon-pink papered walls and the Dalí poster, are interspersed through the sequence rather than sheaved consecutively (#22, Fig. 14 #43 Fig. 9 and #48 pp. 41, 80–81, 89 EE: 23, 43, 47). The double portrait printed across the endpapers of the book is another instance of non-consecutive sequence (#54, #55 EE: 53) (Plates 10, 11). More precisely, a diptych divided by the spine, this end-piece becomes reflexive (and can be regarded as an extension) of the early Triptych of Ray (1991) discussed in Chapter 1 (except that in this case the compositional unity is supplemented by chromatic consistency). Legs crossed, Ray is back in his habitual position, at the end of the day, sitting in the evening light, smoking. The angle (and intensity) of the light casts the figure in stark chiaroscuro. His jumper is of a knobbly nondescript shades-of-grey pattern. A vase of plastic roses on the coffee table lends the scene a splash of tawdry, sleepy classicism. As Ray stares abstractedly into space, a tendril of smoke floats up from his cigarette; it spirals and circulates, echoing the filigree of his ash hair, it curls and plumes, contradicting the stillness of photo-pictorial form.

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In the adjacent panel Ray bursts into a convulsive laugh. Grainy palp of tongue is visible in his open mouth. Motion blur disturbs the surface stillness of the previous moment conveying the suddenness of that unexpected convulsion. But this assumption of the next moment is quickly recognized as illusory, an effect produced by the habit of reading sequence as consequence (subtly reinforced by the infinitesimal change of camera angle). Notice the glass in his right hand. This differential detail suggests that he has smoked his cigarette, implying that the passage of time between the two moments is more discontinuous than the momentary flicker suggested by the conjunction of the two images. Considered more closely, indeed, there is no way of being certain if the right-hand image was even taken before the left. The consecutive effects of ‘embedding and enveloping’ sequences of images are subverted in this manner throughout the photobook, as succeeding image is disclosed and the preceding one concealed, by the manual activity of turning the pages. This process enacts the dynamic passage of time as it shifts inexorably from past to future through the shifting hands of the temporal present. Yet this consecutive dynamic is again revealed as illusory. For it contradicts the temporal experience articulated in the photographs, which is one of circularity, paralysis, inertia, the experience of ‘dead time’ (Baraitser 2017). ‘[B]oth narrative and language know only a semiotic time,’ Barthes argues, the notion of ‘“true” time being a “realist,” referential illusion’ (Barthes 1977: 99). However, ‘Time lived as flow’, as Baraitser claims, time, that is, considered ‘as a series of connections . . . is reinserted back into the stuck and relentless presentness of family life through Billingham’s framing in the form of a photobook’ (2017: 66). Billingham’s book of hours, Baraitser concludes, ‘literally hold[s] the family together’ in contrast to the precariousness and instability of temporal existence which is that residue that always exceeds both the framing of any photographic representation and resists the effort to make sense of it by the imposition of a consecutive narrative form. Again this non-consecutive structure can be identified in the relationship between #26 (pp. 48–49 EE: 27) and #27 (pp. 50–51 EE: 28) (Fig. 2.2), an admittedly severely unfocused sequence, where a black cat is seen clawing a white dog on the floor, and on the next page (the centrefold image already referred to), Liz (in white top) and Ray (in dark jumper) embrace. As the various scenes of domestic violence interspersed throughout the book demonstrate, the couple fight ‘like cats and dogs’. In the first fight scene of the book, Liz boxes Ray (#11 pp. 20–21 EE: 13 Fig. 2.4) as Billingham’s father raises his hands defensively against her blows. In the following fight scene (RAL #25 pp. 46–47 EE: 26 Fig. 2.5), occurring over twenty pages later, Liz (standing right) menaces a dazed Ray (his head is directly in line with her raised, clenched fist) while he looks blankly out of frame (at left) (hair-dye stains visible in his scalp).24 Then, thirty-eight pages (that is, twenty plates) later,

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FIGURE 2.4  Richard Billingham, RAL #11 [EE Plate 13] (1996).

FIGURE 2.5  Richard Billingham, RAL #25 [EE Plate 26] (1996).

in #45 (pp. 84–85 EE: 45 Fig. 2.6), the aftermath of another domestic altercation is evidenced; on this occasion a stunned and injured Ray gazes from his deckchair dejectedly into space, while Liz continues to berate him, a glass of white wine and cigarette in her left hand.

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FIGURE 2.6  Richard Billingham, RAL #45 [EE Plate 45] (1996).

Examined more closely, however, it becomes clear that all three photographs document the same fight. Certain consistencies appear in cross-examination: Ray’s clothes, for instance, are identical. Liz also wears the same outfit (confirmed by her dress’s identifiable red cross-hatching print – see the two safety pins attached to the bust just under her right shoulder). Have they been out? Liz is drinking (which, as per Billingham’s blurb, was unusual). Her capacious grey coat has been removed. Other specific details, for example, that her hair is noticeably shorter, newly styled and dyed (she’s obviously been to the hairdresser) can also be discerned; the garland of tinsel hanging from the wall-mirror is not insignificant. Jason (in white tee-shirt and jeans) partially visible in the periphery of the shots, witnesses (anxiously, as his arrested gestures evince) the scuffle from the margins. (In relation to this sequence, reference to RAL #39 [EE: 39] should also be made. This extremely dark, grainy and unfocused image is almost illegible; however, when closely studied reveals another attack on Ray, who protects himself against the thrown mug captured suspended in mid-air near Liz’s open hand. The tinsel around the mirror, just about visible in this snapshot, suggests that this is part of the same episode.) An image from another fight has been implanted into this subsequence (namely, #35 pp. 64–65 EE: Fig. 2.7). In this scene we are looking at the aftereffects of an unconnected event. But its interpolation into the fight montage serves to disrupt and scramble the key sequence’s resolution into a consecutive narrative. Because this incident takes place in the same room (note the identical wallpaper,

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FIGURE 2.7  Richard Billingham, RAL #35 [EE Plate 35] (1996).

carpet, furniture and Liz’s familiar cabinet of curiosities) an effect of formal and compositional consistency is generated (a similar effect, in fact, to a cinematic mise en scène). Yet certain variables, revealed by analysis, interrupt the projection of consecutive narrative continuity. Specifically, the antagonists’ clothes: Billingham’s mother on this occasion wears an orange floral-print dress and Ray is dressed in nondescript blue-grey V-neck sweater and flannel slacks. The incident occurs at another time. Liz reclines on the couch and stretches out to pass a tissue to Ray, a gesture of contrition; while he, from his deckchair, reaches out to accept the (slightly stained) pacifier. Although apparently defeated, Ray’s bodily vocabulary in this image is crucially ambiguous. Could he, for instance, be looking at that bread knife lying temptingly on the table, its handle embedded to the hilt in the frame? Angled directly toward his open palm, does he already feel it in his hand? In another key compositional reversal to the key montage, Liz appears on the left of this composition and Ray on the right – a change of orientation having significant lexical and semiotic connotations.25 Although statistically, women are the principal victims of domestic violence, on the basis of the analogue photographic evidence presented in Ray’s a Laugh (and, later, in Fishtank), the Billingham family presented an exceptional or atypical case of domestic violence (a norm sequentially eroded as the series unfolds). In other words, despite Ray’s alcoholism, Liz appears to have been the main physical aggressor in the relationship.26 But, on this occasion, as suggested by the alternative orientation, a

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role reversal occurs. Ray fights back: Liz has an injury on her upper lip. Conscious perhaps of how the situation could have taken a more sinister turn, Jason, again partially visible in the wings, raises his arm in anxious anticipation.

Squalid realism and transcendent form If the realism of the 1960s is epitomized by the Kitchen Sink, the emblem of social realism in the era of the decline of the post-industrial proletariat must be the toilet. In the most execrable double spread of Ray’s a Laugh Billingham’s father is lying on the floor of the lavatory (RAL #32 pp. 58–59 EE: 32) (Plate 12). Wedged between open door and side wall of the cubicle, in his failure to control his drunken limbs, Ray has collapsed in an accidental sitting position. His head slumps forward. His left arm hangs limply over the top of the actual toilet with his hand resting on the outside rim (the plastic toilet seat has slid completely off its hinges). Eyes closed and face flushed, Ray’s legs are extended out in front of him in a V-shape, with feet splayed. (The low camera angle makes his knackered white trainers appear clownishly large.) His right-hand rests, old man style, on his right knee, and – the last indignity – his fly is open. Appallingly, the toilet is stained with his vomit (or shit) which dribbles down the outside of the bowl. With a genealogy extending from Sickert’s chamber pots through Francis Bacon’s defecating figures to Sarah Lucas’s Human Toilet (1997) and Is Suicide Genetic? (1996) the toilet has become iconic of the British neorealist aesthetic.27 While engaging with this genealogy Billingham’s toilet picture more particularly recalls the squalid episode of Danny Boyle’s neorealist film Trainspotting (1996), where Renton (sick with the first pangs of heroin withdrawal) rushes to the remembered ‘bog’ of a bookies in the Muirhouse shopping centre and enters what is described in the screenplay, simply, as the ‘most horrible toilet in Britain’ (Welsh 1993: 23; Hodge 1996: 12). The chain he pulls to sluice the blockage away snaps off in his hand. He squats. And a little later is seen down on his hands and knees in the grimy cubicle, feverishly fishing in the toilet water for his inadvertently passed opium suppositories. As he reaches further, rummaging ‘fastidiously’ – as the novel puts it – in the ‘broon’ sludge, he is drawn bodily, or sucked rather, right into the toilet. In the next scene we see him swimming like a pearl-diver down through the disgusting sewer portal now somehow transmogrified into a surreal passage to some idyllic underwater tropical reef. Retrieving his pharmaceuticals (twinkling like ‘luminous pearls’ in the dark underwater), he swims back toward the surface light and, in an outrageous image which circulated widely in the media at the time and became synonymous with the film’s weird blend of the scatological and surreal, the protagonist appears head-and-shoulders emerging from the abyssal toilet bowl. Spitting water, he struggles and shimmies out of the toilet,

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back to grim reality. Released in February 1996, two months, that is, prior to the publication of Ray’s a Laugh, Billingham’s picture would, unquestionably, have incited associations with the ‘horrible toilet’ scene in contemporary audiences. In Visions of England, Paul Dave’s critical study of social class and British cinema, the signature toilet scene of Trainspotting is related to the film’s overall inscription ‘of a wasted underclass’ in a derelict environment (Dave 2006: 84). Here the notion of the ‘underclass’ is categorized in terms of a specific postindustrial unemployed (no- or low-income) proletarian working-class subculture (2006: xv) and is characterized by ‘the tendency to drop out from the labour force’ (2006: 83).28 Yet, he observes, these socio-economic conditions have motivated new cultural contexts of social realism that although distinguished for their squalid and visceral ‘representations of working-class abjection, ruination and hopelessness’ are shot through with moments of evanescent brilliance. Embedded in these contexts are the key social features one associates with the underclass: bored, dreamless characters subsisting on long-term welfare benefits, dwelling in run-down, squalid and dangerous high-rise council estates, narcotic crime, addiction, abuse, victimization (2006: xv). But the interesting (and novel) ingredient of Trainspotting is the combination of underclass content with an antithetical postmodern ‘aesthetic of hyper-stylised, glossy “anti-realism”’ (2006: 83). This unlikely combination of squalid realism and imaginative stylistic sensitivity to the ‘unexpected places’ where ‘horror turns to enchantment’ is identified by Murray Smith as ‘black-magic realism’. Despite a focus on the irredeemably ‘dismal aspects of realist mise en scène’ in the manner of classic social realism (i.e. Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz) and second-generation ‘miserablist’ realists (Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale) this ‘black-magic realism’ represents a new departure in social realism (a category that includes, besides Boyle, film directors such as Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan and Shane Meadows) that uses a whimsical ‘effervescent style’, influenced by the phantasmagorical genre of ‘magic realism’, to motivate a transfiguration of ‘sordid’ mundane reality, by way of oneiric or hallucinatory interludes, into a kind of evanescent photogenic form. And the horrible toilet scene is definitive of Trainspotting’s alchemical motive to transfigure the most abject and ‘impoverished real existence’, through the catalyst of ‘sensuous [aesthetic] richness’ (Smith 2002, in Dave 2006: 89). If, in general, Boyle’s film accepts the premise of squalid realism as incarnated in ‘domestic squalor, cramped tenements, ruined council estates [and] industrial wastelands’ (Dave 2006: 89), through the application of certain cinematic devices (Dave mentions soundtrack, lighting and snappy vernacular dialogue, but this inventory could be extended to include dream sequences, and the surreal chromatic effects enabled by high-definition digital technology . . . panoramic scenery, rapid-cut psychotropic montage, etc.), the synesthetic multi-modal medium manages to distil a certain visionary, spectral and strangely beautiful, transcendence from the

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rotten abyss of ‘grinding poverty’ (2006: 89). Dave quotes Smith. In black-magic realism, The unalloyed awfulness of poverty is . . . continuously off-set by the processes of imaginative and aesthetic transformation. Such transformation [however] does not amount to an escapist sugaring-of-the-pill, because the unpalatable realities of the world are still evident; but neither does it pretend to effect or substitute for, the actual elimination of these realities. (SMITH 2002 in DAVE 2006: 90)

Dave proceeds, not uncontroversially, to relate this new-genre black realism to the transgressive practices of the young British shock artists of the late 1990s (Smith in Dave 2006: 97–8) who similarly, he claims, flirted with subversive ‘Images of the working class as “underclass”’ in order to disturb pretentious middle-class art connoisseurs. This practice formed an ‘important part’ of the Sensation generation’s cultural provocation and, he remarks, often involved (he doesn’t mention Ray’s a Laugh even if he evidently has Julian Stallabrass’s critique of Billingham in mind) the conversion of ‘the working class into an entertaining spectacle of degradation’ (2006: 98). Although Dave’s analysis of the political implications of the mediatized ‘underclass’ does not make direct reference to Billingham, it does imply that Ray’s a Laugh enabled a voyeuristic, socially privileged viewpoint in 1996, a pejorative and manufactured perception of working-class life ‘fetishized’, and commercialized, as seen, for instance, in the work of Martin Parr (Dave’s example). Such glamorized perception he claims, has inspired the semiprurient, sentimentalized stage-stereotypes of working-class people we see on screen (2006: 87). Dave’s approach to the complex politics of asymmetrical social optics is, however, obviously influenced by an uncritical reliance on Stallabrass’s discussion of the Sensation phenomenon in High Art Lite (1999). The latter’s misguided critique of Billingham’s early work includes an oblique (and borderline-offensive) allusion to ‘middle-class porn’ (quoted by Dave 2006: 99).29 But I argue elsewhere that the stark contrast of Ray’s a Laugh to standard entertainment-industry mediations of working-class life is available to even the most cursory glance. It’s obvious, for instance, that the artist has made no attempt to glamorize or stylize his imagery in the effort to produce entertaining ‘underclass’ content, despite what Stallabrass’s theory of the transgressive ‘urban pastoral’ attempts to establish. That is not my argument. Neither does he appear to have any interest in making poverty ‘photogenic’ (poetic or ‘picturesque’ à la Kitchen Sink cinematographers30) in order to stimulate pity or sympathy in his viewers; in fact, this work (like Oldman’s film Nil by Mouth) rejects all ‘placebos and panaceas’ of affect (Lay 2002: 90).

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Ray’s a Laugh invokes the codes of British social realism in order to critique the entertainment industry’s asymmetrical representation of social class. Through his camera lens the social realist text, in a manner comparable to Nan Goldin’s à rebours ‘snapshot verities of intimacy and spontaneity’ (Liebmann 2002: 120), is given a much more transgressive articulation, motivated by an aggressive punk animus, through which it is convulsed into a kind of visceral provocation directed at the traditional middle-class art world. What is involved in this ‘splenetic’ critique is both reflexive and antagonistic: confronting the privileged custodians of contemporary culture with a dangerously close exposure to the realities of social and emotional instability, poverty, abjection, demoralizing boredom, neglect, addiction and domestic violence, which clarifies perhaps that no degree of mediation is capable of reprocessing these realities as ‘photogenic’ or ‘picturesque’ and suggests that viewers, already inscribed into the optical codes reversed by Billingham’s photographic technique, are complicit in the asymmetrical politics of looking: expecting the moral resolution of the ‘beautiful tragedy’ characteristic of the venerable social realist text, we are instead peripheralized, indeed othered by his work, into invasive and unwelcome social tourists. And yet, in a mode related to the new-genre black-magic realism of Trainspotting, I suggest that Billingham’s photographs, despite their squalid content, undoubtedly involve a certain ‘paradoxical beauty’ (but his model is Walter Sickert not Danny Boyle) – an equivalent lens-based ‘effervescent style’ to motivate the transfiguration of sordid mundane reality, by way of pictorial composition, colour and sensitivity to internal spatial structure into evanescent moments of compelling artistic brilliance. To paraphrase Smith, this does not entail that Ray’s a Laugh represents an instance of aestheticized escapism (nothing could be further from the truth). Don’t get me wrong: the unacceptable social realities his photographs represent on a documentary level remain palpably present and are neither glamorized nor sensationalized. Conversely, Billingham’s photographs, like the plays of Shelagh Delaney, simultaneously reject the ‘toxic mythology of a kind of prelapsarian white working-class Britain’ (Coatman 2019). The artist doesn’t pretend to offer a panacea for the elimination of the social realities documented in his photographs; nor does he simply seek to expose them in their squalid presence. Rather, his unprecedented snapshot modality somehow enables unreconstructed images of degrading poverty to be transfigured by processes of imaginative transformation into events of delicate evanescent possibility that yet resist recuperation to the myth of the beautiful tragedy.

Ray’s a Laugh: A post-punk Blakean book In an early review for Artforum Jim Lewis observed that almost every principle of photographic aesthetics is transgressed in Ray’s a Laugh (1997: 62–7). His ‘pictures

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are out of focus, over-exposed, printed with a grain so visible that the image beneath is almost completely obscured. Half of them are absurdly framed’ (Lewis 1997: 62). These snapshots are, he continued, as ‘bad as my own’. They are ‘marred by red-eyed subjects, with the focus fixed on some corner of furniture when the main image is blurred, with the glare of the flash reflected in a window’ (1997: 62). It makes sense to inquire why pictures in such obvious violation of orthodox aesthetic conventions remain artistically compelling. Lewis addresses this enigma by stating that even if it appears deficient or inept, Billingham’s amateurish antiaesthetic nevertheless seamlessly converges with the subversive ‘aesthetic of our times’ (i.e. the late 1990s). And although characterized by a vague set of criteria this transgressive aesthetic is epitomized above all, he says, by fucking up: ‘Fucking up so completely, yet with such confidence and control, that one’s medium expands’ (1997: 65). And Billingham, he concludes, is ‘better at fucking up than any photographer’ (1997: 65). Aesthetic distance is diminished by the amateur spontaneity of these photos; their opportunistic immediacy exceeds the typical safeguards of aesthetic mediation having the effect of intensifying the transparency of the photographic surface almost to the point of physical sensation, rendering its content uncomfortably present in its specificity. Often misread as deliberate formal ineptitude, the artistic impact of Ray’s a Laugh however, like a lot of transgressive art of the era, is paradoxically increased by virtue of its violent de-sublimation of aesthetic mediation. Consider a key example from Ray’s a Laugh, the photograph of Billingham’s father falling (#13, pp. 24–25 EE: 15) (Plate 13). In this snapshot Ray is captured mid-fall lurching forcefully forward onto the floor in a mismanaged attempt to get up from the armchair. A moment of decision aborted by circumstance, a graceless failure of motor control, a pathetically minor physical catastrophe, again, Billingham’s snapshot practice explores the negative imprint of the decisive moment. Even if there’s a very distant fringe relation to Cartier-Bresson’s (1952 [2018]) graceful eternalizing of the ephemeral quotidian instant in (for example) the celebrated photo Place de l’Europe (1932) Billingham’s image is parodic of established photographic technique to the point of ridicule (OK it’s fucked-up). Just before he hits the carpet, however, Ray doubles up in a contorted, if absurdly acrobatic position. With both feet off the ground, his left hand’s already on the floor, bent back uncomfortably under him as an instinctive fulcrum to steady his descent, his eyes are closed. But he’s barely sentient. Anticipating the horrible toilet picture discussed above where Ray is actually already on the floor (the parallel is reinforced by Ray’s grisaille clothing: he wears the exact same tatty tweed sports jacket, nondescript sweater, black pants and white trainers as in the toilet picture) again, the disrupted sequence undermines any suggestion of consecutive flickerbook narrative development. Critics tend automatically to associate the two images (Gardner 2009). Perhaps he fell over on the journey to the toilet from the

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living room. But perhaps this incident happened later. Or perhaps it is an entirely different evening. No matter. Notice penetrating the picture from the left side and consuming a good fifth of the entire image, a completely obscuring pitch-black band. What is this? The end of the roll of film? A double exposure? Something obstructing the lens? Whatever it is – it’s a paradigm example of Lewis’s fucked-up photographic instinct. But wait. A pitch-dark abyss, like an encroaching shadow threatening to engulf Ray’s world, a blackness fringed at the edges. Is this intrusion not connotative of drunken black-out, oblivion, the void . . . death? Such associations seem almost inevitable. In response to Lingwood’s perplexity, the artist explained: ‘It makes it look like he’s tumbling over more. And that something tragic may happen’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 58). And Lingwood proceeds to link the abyss with evidence of the abyssal throughout the sequence where motifs – he specifically mentions faces – are seen disintegrating, dissolving into nothingness, suggestive of an overall theme of ‘dissolution’. Billingham’s response: My dad’s an alcoholic. And his body is wasting away and getting worse. The dark has something to do with that – with death and drinking too much. (IN LINGWOOD 1998a: 58)

If read laterally (left to right) the image suggests however that Ray’s not falling into the abyss. He’s falling away from it, almost as if trying to escape the darkness that’s threatening to invade his consciousness from the ‘edge of things’. Abutting dangerously into the viewer’s fore-space, the falling figure seems to violate the integrity of the picture surface. The image’s borderless bleed past the edges of the frame emphasizes this effect, giving the image an immersive quality, and generating the impression of a fourth-wall break, which reemphasizes its startling effect. This is a precise instance of what Malcolm Richards characterizes as the convulsion of the frame: a result of the rupturing of pictorial space by the violent intrusion of reality, the frame, he writes, is ‘shaken’ (Richards 2008: 37). The real here is theorized, following Lacan, as an encounter with a traumatic event that, although resists direct representation, protrudes through the pictorial surface. The ‘Real’, in this context, as opposed to the symbolic order, connotes some ultimately unrepresentable oppugnant actuality that involves the ‘violent rupture of the form and procedure of the work itself ’ (McCarthy 2014: 22).31 The Real in this refined definition, McCarthy explains, signifies an excessive eruption that appears to perforate the pictorial surface and ends up on ‘the screen or strip of film, destroying it’ (2014: 22). It is now possible to indicate the specific reason why Billingham’s ineptness and inadequacy result in a creative expansion of the medium. It’s not merely due to the complementary appropriateness of the form relative to the subject matter;

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rather this achievement relates to the fact that these performative, amateurish ‘flaws’ constitute specific alienation effects – sophisticated, aesthetically generative accidents – that, just like the Brechtian anti-dramatic V-effekt (alienation effect), serve to undermine the tendency of pictorial representation to objectify and, as a result, subvert conventional aesthetic codes that uncritically enable subjective responses such as sympathy and sentimentality. In Billingham’s scene of general collapse, a significant detail that supports this reading manifests itself: a picture has fallen over, like an autumn leaf, and lies face down (and upside-down) partially concealing a cheap plastic serving tray on the floor. It looks like a canvas defectively stretched over a frame (could it be one of Billingham’s early paintings?). This element, a blind frame, its surface averted from the viewer, represents an allegory of pictorial falling inset accidentally into the mainframe, somehow subverting the bounding conditions of the pictorial frame. The image of falling contains a fallen image. Admitting (to Robert Chesshyre) that his unconscious is structured like an art history text, Billingham noticed afterwards that this image contains an oblique reference to Michael Andrews’s extraordinary 1952 painting A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over: ‘I’m sure his falling man was in my head when I took that picture of my father’ (in Chesshyre 2001). With reference to the expansion of (the photographic) medium, Lewis again puts his finger on the salient issue: Billingham’s early work can be characterized as the radicalization of social realism for the post-punk generation.32 The emphasis on ‘ineptitude’ as subversion of authority and the subsequent ‘advertisement of dysfunction’ are related more than anything to the punk ethos where keynotes of ‘failure and incompetence became precious because they reversed the normative emphasis on technique and mastery’ (Bannister in Hopps 2008: 16). To paraphrase Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, being bad on purpose represented for the post-punk generation, a means of fulfilling the cultural promise of the anarchopunk revolution. Affirmation of ‘damaged, marginalised, forsaken and stigmatised’ performances suddenly represented a destructive ‘refusal’ of the cheap stylish perfectionism and pseudo-sophistication glorified in the 1980s mainstream (stylistic values informed by a superficially partisan neo-conservatism) and should now be regarded (with the advantage of critical distance), Gavin Hopps argues, as symptomatic of what he calls (in an ingenious formulation) ‘the negative inspiration of Thatcherism’ (Hopps 2008: 17, 28). It was in response to this fraudulent surface perfectionism that the ‘amateurism and ineptitude’ identified with the elaboration of post-punk expression, he concludes, become highly valued as a counterforce ‘to slickness and cosmetic perfection[ism]’ of mainstream popular culture (2008: 29). It is also however, as Mark Fisher observes, crucially important to recognize that post-punk culture is not completely captured by the focus on ineptitude and amateurism, but it is, equally plausibly, defined by the antithetical tendencies of extreme formal control and rigorous musical articulation; admittedly virtuoso

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individual performative skill (associated with prog-rock) was violently replaced by new collaborative beat-based structures of rhythmic complexity and unprecedented improvisatory compositional logic. As a case in point, he describes the music of Manchester group The Fall as an ‘impossible combination of the shambolic and the disciplined, the cerebral-literary and the idiotic-physical’ (Fisher 2010: 103). A more accurate description of Billingham’s early photographs I cannot think of: his fucked-up, aggressively inept, amateurish, deliberately shambolic photographic style is relativized by an equally forceful counterweight of formal control and sophistication, an almost scientific commitment to traditional aesthetic compositional and pictorial exactitude. It is this hybrid of incompatible contraries that accomplishes Billingham’s expansion of the medium. Otherwise how are such contradictory assessments of Ray’s a Laugh – as formally ‘fucked up’, on the one hand, and, on the other, as having a ‘downright classical sense of monumental figures, of old-fashioned composition and invention [which] gives the chaos depicted a formal grounding [and] contributes to the work’s instant readability’ (Williams 1996: 31) – to be accommodated? Ray’s a Laugh is a book of contraries in the spirit of William Blake’s innocence and experience: an unwritten book composed of equal elements of chaos and control, anarchy and order, abandonment and restraint, opacity and clarity, mobilized to support a tragicomic story that exposes the various contraries of the human condition – coldness and affection, cruelty and compassion, intimacy and detachment – ultimately personified in the physical contrasts of Billingham’s Punch-and-Judy parents.

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3

THEY FUCK YOU UP 1 SENSATION | FISHTANK (1997–8)

The Saatchi-effect By the summer of 1996 things augured well for Billingham’s career. Ray’s a Laugh was published in April, and he had been awarded the Felix H Man memorial prize the year before by the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television. Photographer Paul Graham, impressed by his work in the Barbican exhibition, arranged an introduction to Anthony Reynolds, which instigated a productive long-term (and continuing) partnership between the artist and the London gallerist. A group show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery was followed by a very well-received debut solo exhibition in the gallery in June for which his family snapshots were enlarged to exhibition scale. In autumn, his work was selected for the prestigious New Photography 12 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,2 and in the same month, it appeared in the important Sensationprecursor exhibition of contemporary British art Life/Live curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (with Laurence Bossé) in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. The biggest breakthrough of his career, however, was imminent. Sometime in 1996 (based on his debut solo show in London) Billingham (like many British artists of his generation) came to the attention of entrepreneur Charles Saatchi (73), partner of M&C Saatchi advertising (formerly Saatchi & Saatchi)3 who, in the 1980s had reinvented himself as an art-market investor. In the early 1990s, Saatchi started to hive off his not-insubstantial collection of international art to initiate an aggressive campaign of local acquisition. Turning his attention to unknown recent graduates of London art institutions (principally Goldsmiths and the Royal College) he targeted degree shows and independent artist-run exhibitions in temporary locations around the city (notably the landmark 1988 exhibition Freeze curated by entrepreneurial Goldsmiths undergraduate Damien

Hirst in a repurposed London docklands administration block4) (Ford 1996; Marler 2019). Legend had it that Saatchi would arrive by limousine at commercial city galleries to purchase subversive and morbidly humorous (as well as relatively inexpensive) work by an emergent, opportunistic and highly ambitious affiliation of London-based young iconoclasts (as well as Hirst, this now infamous group of artists included Mat Collishaw, Marcus Harvey, Gary Hume, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Stephen Murphy, Marc Quinn, Jenny Saville, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wilson, and later, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, and Mark Wallinger). Renowned for ostentatious gestures such as purchasing entire shows or commissioning monumental work based on sketchily conceived concepts,5 Saatchi’s sponsorship was so publicized, spectacular and influential, and generated so much media (and artworld) hype, that it was often sufficient to inaugurate and sustain the career of a recent art-school graduate (some of whose subsequent celebrity status eclipsed their artistic output). A new post-recession atmosphere of affirmative investment entrepreneurialism, urban regeneration and art-market speculation (which converged with the transfer of political power to New Labour in 1997) was the cultural crucible within which the ‘myth of the young British artist’ (YBA) took shape (Ford 1996).6 But it was the impact of Saatchi’s Midas touch on the pre-millennium British (principally London-based) art scene – arguably the 1990s equivalent of the propagandistic ‘Saatchi-effect’7 of the 1980s – that provided the most profound, pervasive and exclusive accelerator of this unprecedentedly popular new artistic genre, occasioning sycophantic comparisons to Renaissance models of influence and patronage (Jardine 1997: 46; Slyce 1997: 106); the ironic twist being that this latest expansion of the Saatchi brand was predicated on Charles’s new status as connoisseur of a weird, taboo-breaking transgressive style of contemporary art closely identified with some offensive, even borderline-obscene and potentially antisocial objects (Julius 2002). Acknowledging the historic genesis of this unique model of enterprising patronage and promotion, Peter Wollen designates the Saatchi generation, ‘Thatcher’s Artists’. All the contemporary artists in the collection, he observes, grew up ‘in the Thatcher years’. In 1989, when she was replaced as prime minister by John Major, they were in their twenties, he points out, ‘having lived all their adult life under Thatcher’ (1997: 8). Yet it was principally through Saatchi’s sponsorship that the legacy of ‘Thatcherism’ became synonymous with the Young British Artist affiliation; it is especially evident, Wollen suggests, in the group’s ‘affinity with advertising art’, with artists reflecting their influencer’s partiality ‘for images which grab the viewer instantly rather than calling for contemplative appreciation’ (Wollen 1997: 8). This was also, however, as Dan Fox reminds us, the last generation to benefit from free higher education in the UK (Fox 2013: 105); and, indeed, an unusual quantity of Saatchi’s artists come from working-class backgrounds, children of families disadvantaged by the

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Thatcher administration’s drastic socio-economic programme who benefitted from the upward social mobility afforded by widening participation in third level education. Perhaps Saatchi felt an avuncular responsibility for the cultivation of this new demographic of art-school graduates, as his advertising agency was notoriously instrumental in the ideological victory of the Conservative Party during the 1979 election campaign that, arguably, propelled Thatcher through two terms of office over the next decade. During the early 1990s, selections from Saatchi’s expanding collection were exhibited in three acclaimed shows (Young British Artists I, II, III, 1992–4) at his spacious skylit warehouse gallery (a decommissioned industrial installation restored in 1985) in the London suburb of St John’s Wood,8 a cycle which culminated in the monumental Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection, the biggest and most audacious exposé of his collection to date. Opening on 18 September 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly the show was curated by (Exhibitions Secretary) Norman Rosenthal and featured forty-two artists with an average age of thirty-three. Perfectly capturing the pre-millennium zeitgeist, visitors to the exhibition encountered an anarchic, maddeningly eclectic feed of sub-artistic oddities. Ranging from the absurd to the cynical, the confessional to the nihilistic, the vernacular-obscene to the gothic-perverse, Rosenthal’s curation of the Saatchi collection seemed intent on assimilating every available unfiltered response to the anxious finale of a violent and apocalyptic, and moribund, century. Despite its spectacular success, it proved to be one of the most divisive exhibitions in the history of the Royal Academy leading to the resignation of several high-ranking Academicians and witnessing at least two assaults on displayed works during the opening week.9 Protests by various pressure groups and child protection organizations took place outside Burlington House throughout the installation (mainly directed against Marcus Harvey’s pixelated portrait of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley).10 The controversy precipitated some hysterical media reaction, with tabloids and TV chat show guests venting fauxoutrage and incredulity while the broadside press attempted to stifle vulgar moral panic by publishing cynical deflationary reviews. But aside from the hype – and the mania – the Royal Academy show remains the most articulate and popular British response to the international conceptual art paradigm (to which it added indigenous punkish tensions of subversive Dadaism, hedonistic nihilism and techno surveillance anxiety). Sloughing off the ‘ossified heritage’ from which it originated and within which it was situated, Sensation was widely recognized as the key event of the internationalization of British art, the catalyst of its initiation into the global theatre of international modernity, bringing the post-war process of the ‘de-insularisation’ of British culture to a decisive conclusion (Shone 1997: 14; Wollen 1997: 7; Slyce 1997: 106).11 A very important factor often overlooked in reassessments of the shock art of the 1990s, however, is that the Sensation exhibition was not conceived for an

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exclusively British audience: the exhibition (which can also be considered to denote the recuperation of transgressive art into the cultural mainstream) opened, to rapturous acclaim, in the Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, on September 1998 (running until January 1999)12 and, following that travelled (not without controversy) to the Brooklyn Museum in New York on October 1999 (until January 2000).

Year zero Arguably the immense popularity of Saatchi and Rosenthal’s exhibition was due to its rapprochement with other contemporaneous streams in British popular culture: it paralleled the zenith of Britpop, for instance, and, like that movement, capitalized on the cool Britannia ‘things-can-only-get-better’ attitude of hedonistic optimism13 that followed Labour’s landslide victory in the general elections four months earlier (Lay 2002: 104). The transition to the ‘New Labour’ administration under the trendy and (apparently) benevolent Tony Blair signalled the de facto terminus of eighteen years of Conservative (Thatcherite) government. With preelection promises to end child poverty (which had doubled between 1979 and 1997) and provide support for the low-income and disadvantaged by restructuring the welfare system, coupled with historic devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales, as well as the revolutionary Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1997 was in many respects something of an annus mirabilis – a kind of year zero – inaugurating a new era of post-recession British positivity, affluence and feel-good cultural identity. In the introduction to the Penguin Book of the Contemporary Short Story (2018) editor Philip Hensher situates the genesis of the contemporary era precisely in the year 1997. Invoking the death of unanimously loved Diana, Princess of Wales (bereaving an entire nation when she was killed in a freak motor accident in Paris) in conjunction with Blair’s election, Hensher suggests that, with these twin events – ‘experienced by those who lived through them as revealing huge changes in the nation’s psyche and manners’ – the ‘structure of feeling’ of the contemporary was established. This rhapsodizing of an epoch that many remember as kind of ‘national hysteria’ may be dismissed as nostalgic; yet it can be conceded that the year 1997 signifies some ‘kind of watershed’ (Eastham 2018: 21). And it was this apocalyptic year-zero watershed (with its admixture of manic optimism, hedonism, hysteria, moral panic, and collective psyche) that Saatchi’s exhibition so comprehensively encapsulated in 1997 (Eastham 2018). Critics, however, were – and remain – deeply divided. According to some, the exhibition should not really be considered a ‘survey’ of contemporary British art at all, for it was, Julian Stallabrass argues, a tendentious showcase of the sensibility of a powerful impresario with a predilection for

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immediate ‘one-off shocks’ and a preference for an art of ‘considered vacuity’ completely ‘complicit with the mass media’ (Stallabrass 1999: 200, 216, 217). Consequently, the Saatchi collection promoted an extravagantly ‘false impression’ of contemporary British art (1999: 200). In Will Self ’s equally jaundiced view, the Saatchi artists are the offspring of a spectacular (not entirely unproductive he grudgingly acknowledges) ‘marriage between opportunism, commodification and nihilism’ (2001: 315). Wollen, on the other hand, has defended the exhibition as more than just vulgar sensationalism and fatuous celebrity spectacle: by offering the opportunity to assess ‘the complex context in which art is made today’, he argues, Saatchi facilitated a unique constellational view beyond the ‘contemporary London art world’ according to which the past of British culture can be reevaluated and its postmodern future speculated upon (1997: 9). Despite critical reservations (and the desensitization of hindsight) some exciting synaptic connections were activated among the strange items on display in Sensation. But the publicity and celebrity associated with the exhibition occasioned a certain shock-fatigue effect that tends to immunize against the genuine novelty and weirdness of the exhibits: objects such as Tracey Emin’s glowing tent quilted with the names of her exes (Everyone I Have EverSlept With 1963–1995), Hirst’s macabre natural-history sculptures (A Thousand Years 1990), Marc Quinn’s cryogenic blood-head (Self 1991), Harvey’s ironic portrait of Myra Hindley (composed of the handprints of her child victims) (Myra 1995), the Chapman Brothers’ sexualized retail-realist mutations (Zygotic Acceleration .  .  . 1995) or the lumpen tabloid vernacular of Sarah Lucas’s post-punk assemblages. Juxtaposed, indeed, with such curiosities, Billingham’s family photography, despite its anarchic content, stood out as strangely restrained and unironic, even sincere, artwork. Beside it, in the midst of the gallery space, Rachel Whiteread’s sepulchral sculpture of the solidified interior of a bedsit flat (Ghost 1990) resonated with his salon-hung snapshots, invoking memories of the lost domestic realm of the Kitchen Sink heritage; but by far the most intriguing and uncanny juxtaposition was with Ron Mueck’s sculpture Dead Dad (1996/7). Rendered doubly uncanny by the disturbing verisimilitude and dwarfish scale of the model, it looked as if the body of Billingham’s father (still living at the time) had been removed, stripped and placed with infinite gentleness on the cold, low-lying, immaculately white plinth, in preparation for the arrival of Lilliputian undertakers. Amid the general ambience of ‘considered vacuity’ and immediate ‘one-off shock’, the Billingham Sensation hang stood out as conspicuously different; people found it more absorbing, for one thing. ‘Even if they do nothing else’, novelist Nick Hornby observed at the time, unlike a lot of the other exhibits, ‘the photographs of Richard Billingham do detain you’ (Hornby 2001: 224). You might not want to be detained, you might think, when you see his pictures of his battered, bewildered, distressed and alcoholic father Raymond, and of

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Elizabeth, his enormous, tattooed mother, that you’d rather wander off and look at something funnier, or more beautiful, or less real . . . But you can’t. (HORNBY 2001: 224)

The curatorial effect Sensation was the first time Billingham’s work was shown as part of the Saatchi collection. And inclusion in the exhibition marked his initiation into the contemporary British avant-garde and, unexpectedly, into the cultural mainstream.14 The 1997 Burlington House installation, however, had two key – subtle but significant – effects on his work, both of which are crucial for assessing his participation in the young British art phenomenon and which were to haunt his practice over the following decade. The first is an effect of curation. Enlarged using Fuji Long-Life colour process (to 105 × 158 cm, 120 × 80 cm and 50 × 75 cm) unframed and mounted on aluminium, isolated from the book, and at exhibition scale, Billingham’s photographs were transformed into distinct and independent art objects. Unlike the relationality among the panels of the monochrome triptych in the Barbican show – or the sequential seriality of Ray’s a Laugh – the salon-hang arrangement had the effect of individuating the images into separate pictorial units. Established against the surrounding white space, although unframed, the differently scaled prints seemed all the more dissociated from the sequence from which they derived. Although appropriate to the architectural dimensions of the gallery space, the enlarged scale had the effect of decentring the optimum range from which to negotiate Billingham’s images, inducing viewers to assume a necessary physical distance (some were hung quite high on the walls). The interjection of such a necessary distance made the prints less immersive than the photobook; the physical distance predisposed a perceptual or psychological distance that functioned ideologically in the gallery space to influence how the figures in the photographs, now life-size, were observed.15 Even if related work by Billingham had appeared in themed exhibitions and other survey shows prior to Sensation, this was the first time that fully resolved work had been deliberately and consciously curated according to a predetermined cultural agenda.16 Most importantly, this entailed that his work was installed and inevitably reframed relative to the transgressive aesthetic sponsored by Saatchi and exemplified by the surrounding constellation of objects. Yet, this prescribed curatorial programme was largely a construct of publicity, for, ultimately, the only frame of reference in evidence (when the hype was stripped away) was Saatchi’s imprimatur which, as mentioned, was proving highly valuable (but also somewhat tendentious) for an aspiring artist’s career; but lacking thematic unity (beyond a

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vague sense of national and cultural identity) any shared coherence among the multiplicity of heterogeneous objects in Sensation was conferred by the collector’s brand. As a result, when critics like Julian Stallabrass approached Billingham’s work, they tended to notice only ‘the lurid patterning, decorative knick-knacks, tattoos, filth and general disorder of his parents and their home’, which, ‘when brought into contact and contrast with the minimalist space of the gallery’, made the work look exploitative (Stallabrass 1999: 251). The externalist, pejorative perspective within which this work was installed seemed controlled precisely, to his eyes, by this institutional contact and this contrast; and relative to this melodramatic spectacle, Billingham’s working-class family were exposed to ‘public examination’ in an environment ‘where a middle-class, liberal consensus reigns [and] where unreconstructed lumpen attitudes may be collectively sneered at’ (1993: 19). Reframed by the general vision of subversion promoted by Sensation Billingham’s photographs appeared to Stallabrass like exploitative representations of the working class.17 Through the distorting prism of vague transgressive values associated with the exhibition (a fuzzy mashup of stylish postmodernist cynicism, ironic bad taste, and iconoclastic hedonism) Billingham, in the absence of ‘explicit critique’, could be regarded as manipulating prevailing social attitudes in order to activate bourgeois anxieties regarding the presence of a parasitic antisocial ‘underclass’ (Stallabrass 1999: 251). This phenomenon refers to the atmosphere of judgemental ideological assumptions that characterizes the working class as a ‘pitifully dysfunctional’ social residue (Jones 2012). With connotations of ‘feckless’, benefit-addicted, vulgar, ‘common’, atavistic and amoral, the ‘underclass’, in this sense, is declassified as a ‘nondescript pov mass’ (Hatherley 2011: 67). Owen Jones has analysed this phenomenon of social discrimination under the disparaging category of the ‘chav’ caricature.18 Within this ideological context, Billingham’s images could have appeared as if the lives of the photographed people were displayed as specimens of the ‘dysfunctional working-class family’ for aesthetic consumption or ridicule, or, worse perhaps, for pity, ‘their profiles drawn from a social bestiary of grotesques’ (Dave 2006: 88) summoning, contributing to, perhaps even amplifying, the social prejudices already inscribed in these kinds of exclusive cultural spaces (Stallabrass 1999: 251). Originating in the New Right political discourse of the early 1990s, the subcategory of the ‘underclass’, Paul Dave explains, belongs in the perceived ‘welfare state’s bias towards entitlement and neglect of individual responsibility’ (2006: 83); but this preconception obscures, he argues, the ‘destructive effects of capitalism on particular sections of the working class, including the young, single mothers [a particular focus19], ethnic minorities and [perhaps most paradigmatic of all] the unemployed’ (2006: 83). Indeed many, he adds, ‘too often’ accepting the notion of the underclass ‘as a solid sociological datum’, have, since 1979, been convinced that the residue of the traditional old-school industrial working

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class, if it failed to be successfully recuperated by post-Thatcherist neoliberalism, has been absorbed into ‘“underclass” swamps’ of benefit street and sink estate (2006: xviii). When Robert Chesshyre awkwardly describes Billingham’s parents as ‘dole wallahs’, it is precisely this constellation of social assumptions that is invoked (2001). Paradigmatic ‘Brit-grit’ movies, for example, that treat established underclass themes of poverty, squalor, addiction, abuse, violence, crime and so on (Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth [1997] for instance) rather than representing any genuine ‘reappearance of the lumpenproletariat’ (nineteenth-century sociological subcategory of the impoverished mercantile working class) in contemporary culture may simply expose a fetishized and unpleasantly voyeuristic ‘range of middle-class attitudes towards the working class’ to view (Dave 2006: xviii; Hill 1986: 136).20 An attentive reading of Stallabrass’s critique in High Art Lite reveals a more nuanced understanding of Billingham’s work, predicated on the awareness that he should be distinguished from the more populist and opportunistic excesses of the typical Sensation artists. Acknowledgement, for instance, of the reflexive implication of the artist within the work is not necessarily a reiteration of the obvious point that Billingham is ‘a product of the environment he is representing’ (1999: 251) but a rather more subtle argument that responds to his intrinsic (if literally absent) presence within the structure of the social space surveyed by his lens (Stallabrass 1999: 251); the significant distinction here being ‘the identity of the artist’. With this important realization, Stallabrass concedes, every preconceived documentary assumption is radically realigned: Billingham is no paternalistic, morally concerned, pseudo-anthropologist with a self-appointed responsibility to invade the social space of the other in order to assess the effects of new ‘workingclass poverty in 1990s Britain’.21 (In fact, one of the enduring achievements of Billingham’s art practice is its predictive critique of the patronizing moralism of so-called ‘socially engaged’ art.) But neither can his practice be accommodated to the ‘extraordinary vision’ of the cultural tourist with an unwritten mandate to expose the other’s curious social habitus for the enjoyment of manqué and economically privileged connoisseurs (Sontag 1977; Cashell 2009). By the same token it is important to distinguish Billingham’s post-documentary practice from the concerned moralism of Cornell Capa’s ‘humanistic photojournalism’ (Burn in Remes 2007b: 2; Germain 2018) where a tacit pictorial codification of the subject as other (and ipso facto inferior) reigns in order to generate a sympathetic response – an effect that presupposes the asymmetric optics of one privileged social stratum observing another. After all, as Higson correctly observes, it is only from a privileged socio-economic perspective that poverty and squalor can appear picturesque (Higson 1996: 151). Billingham is, as Stallabrass repeats – but does he really need to remind us? – ‘photographing his immediate family’. And from this datum, as Larry Sultan says, in another context, ‘everything follows’ (in Williams 1994). ‘With the

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photographs’, Billingham later reflected, ‘I tried to make them as truthful as I could and hopefully that element overcomes any exploitative element’. He adds uncertainly, ‘I think there was a warmth to them’ (Billingham in Adams 2016). In the commentary on the Saatchi website (composed in 1996) the artist admits that, when he first showed the photographs, he was embarrassed by his family, adding that his original motivation was to produce paintings that would somehow convey what he then referred to as the ‘tragedy of it all’.22 This brings us to the second effect Sensation had on Billingham’s work.

The aesthetic effect At enlarged scale, Billingham’s installation in the Royal Academy gallery had the subsidiary consequence of bringing the latent iconic references sublimated in the photos to manifestation. Subtle and implicit references to the history of art, as considered, recur throughout his work; but these allusions – sometimes conscious, sometimes unintentional – are often so oblique that they tend to remain unacknowledged. Positioned on the white wall of the gallery space, detached from the photobook sequence, and, more importantly, presented in the museal environment, these latent associations were, arguably for the first time, revealed. Perhaps the most obvious is the photo of Liz reclining on the sofa (presumably watching TV) (Untitled NRAL [1994]) (Fig. 3.1) (in Sensation catalogue [Rosenthal ed. 1997: 54]) which alludes to Francisco Goya’s (clothed/unclothed) Majas (1800) (identified by other critics e.g., Searle 2000; Remes 2007 and acknowledged by the artist himself). The esoteric Spanish artist famously made two versions of the Maja – one clothed, the other nude – and the stereoscopic flicker between her dressed and naked alter-ego, surely a ludic allegory of the classical beauty-truth nexus, is subtly re-enacted in this photo to suggest the interplay of concealment

FIGURE 3.1  Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1994). Colour photograph on aluminium (105 × 158 cm).

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and exposure in his own practice; we may not like to imagine Billingham’s mother naked, but her posture on the couch (wearing, incidentally, the florid dress familiar from the jigsaw piece) relays us irresistibly to Goya’s model and its dualism of forms, a dyad only completed when the second tableau lights up like an X-ray in the imagination. Some of the other significant symmetries of the series have already been identified, for instance, the relationship between the double Father and Son portrait (RAL #3) (Plate 6) (see Rosenthal ed. 1997: 56) and Diane Arbus’s Identical Twins (1967) as well as the evanescent afterimage of the Mother and Child icon in RAL #49 (EE: 48). Whether these allusions are intentionally implanted in the work, it should now be clear, is irrelevant; for Billingham makes photographs, as Martin Maloney memorably put it, his ‘head swimming with art history’ (2000: np). Admitting that he spent his adolescence immersed in art books in Cradley Heath public library, classical pictorial forms and illustrative templates have become ingrained in the artist’s iconographical unconscious and insinuate their way into his frame of reference, involuntarily reawakening afterimages of canonical art in his viewers. The diaphanous presence, for example, of Rodchenko’s portrait of his mother in the subtext of Billingham’s maternal studies (especially RAL #18 EE: 20 and Untitled [Liz on couch in red patterned sweater and white chiffon skirt] 1994) or the Michael Andrews quotation in RAL #13 (EE: 15) (Plate 13) (included in the Sensation hang) constitute such unconsciously motivated features of his work. Several other instances of unintentional reference can be indicated throughout the series. We could, for example, cite the way the photo of the artist’s parents eating their TV dinner (RAL #6 pp. 10–11 EE: 8) recalls Picasso’s etching the Frugal Repast (1904) and how this reference, in turn, reveals implicit allusions throughout the series to the particoloured ragged harlequins of Picasso’s Rose Period (1904–6). And juxtaposed with the later picture of Liz delivering a plate of boiled eggs to a senescent Ray on the couch (Untitled 1996) who, with both hands outstretched, reaches up to his supper, this snapshot also invokes Goya’s Black Paintings, especially, the weird kitchen mural Two Old People Eating of 1820–23. The curious phenomenon of unintentional reference is closely related to the theory of ‘intertextuality’ (intertextualité) developed by Julia Kristeva in a study of Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism: this is the thesis that meaning is not an insular entity (or contained within a bounded, discrete entity like the text) but always re-negotiated through a vast interweaving of other preceding cultural discourses of which the singular text is the mediumistic vehicle (Kristeva 1980: 69). The signifying text is essentially multivocal, Kristeva argues, an ‘absorption of and reply to’ other texts, a radiotelephonic medley of other voices (1980: 69, 71, 79). Every text, she writes, ‘is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (1980: 66). According to the theory of intertextuality, culture operates as an immense cloud-like depository of open-access references that interpenetrate the collective unconscious and are

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creatively (if involuntarily) tapped into and reactivated (as ‘semantic latencies’) in specific works (Kristeva 1980: 222). Building on Kristeva’s theory, Roland Barthes later characterized the intertext as a kind of xenomorphic ‘tissue’ sutured, grafted and intertwined with unintentional and subliminal ‘citations, references, echoes’ that ultimately emanate from this anonymous cultural repository of ‘antecedent or contemporary’ discourses and conversations (in Harrison & Wood 1992: 944). But the concept of intertextuality should not be confused with the traditional effort to identify influence or locate precedents or origins. Attempting ‘to find the “sources”, the influences’, the origin, Barthes argues, ‘is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are’, he insists, ‘anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read (Déjà-lu) they are’, Barthes concludes (reinforcing the point using an unreferenced citation from Walter Benjamin), ‘quotations without inverted commas’ (1992: 944, my emphasis, see Benjamin 1999b: 458). Quotation without quotation marks, echoic resonances, formal affinities, iconic inheritances, ‘unconscious optical’ allusions to canonical works (and not just canonical, remember the horrible toilet?) in Billingham’s snapshots strangely recall the way Manet engaged the European tradition through his citation of Titian’s Venus d’Urbino (1538) in the seminal Olympia (1863). The intentionality of Manet’s reference to Titian is debatable, but according to T. J. Clark, the reference ‘back to tradition in Olympia’ was ‘invisible’ to contemporary viewers (in Frascina and Harris 1992: 110). The classical allusion was, he writes elsewhere, ‘painted out or painted over’ so that it appeared ‘no part’ of Manet’s picture (1990: 95). Consider again the famous photograph of Billingham’s mother absorbed in the completion of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle (RAL #20) (Plate 7). It was observed in Chapter 2 that this photograph, perhaps the most iconic image of the artist’s career, was the first to become independent of the photobook sequence; and its exhibition in Sensation (in its uncropped state)23 facilitated this process. Here Liz is engrossed in the process of selecting a piece of the puzzle from a tray on her lap (Rosenthal, ed. 1997: 53). This photograph makes intertextual reference to Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1658–60), one of the Dutch painter’s most celebrated paintings. Supposedly an allegory of feminine virtue, in this work, a woman is captured in the quotidian act of pouring milk from a large jug into a terracotta vessel, the trickling stream of liquid contradicting the frozen pictorial stillness of the painting. Head tilted downward, eyes cast in private concentration, the figure is immersed in the performance of the routine task (Schneider 2007). A later painting The Lacemaker (1669–70) (Fig. 3.2) invokes a similar state of almost motionless introspection even closer to Billingham. As well as the shared physiognomy of absorbed concentration, in this instance, compare the seamstress’s hands engaged in her needlework with the mother’s as she searches for the piece. Her hands (in contrast to the blunt fists we have witnessed them become in conflict) articulate the existential state of absorption. Vermeer’s silent projections of everyday life anticipated photography;

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FIGURE 3.2  Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker (1669–70). Oil on canvas (24 × 21 cm). The Louvre Paris. Getty Images / The Washington Post / Katherine Frey.

and it is widely recognized that he used proto-photographic optical devices (such as the camera obscura) to achieve a more convincing transfer of opticality and perceptual experience to canvas (Schneider 2007: 18–19). Note the strange flatness in the framing of Billingham’s photograph (this planimetric effect is especially noticeable in the stretched ashtray at bottom right): the picture must have been taken from a high angle, possibly while standing on a chair.24 Michael Fried, in his study of mid-eighteenth-century French painting, develops a distinction between the pictorial modes of absorption and theatricality (Fried 1988). He discovers in the development from Chardin and Greuze to early impressionism, a key subgenre devoted to the depiction of subjects in captive states of private concentration. These absorptive studies engage the viewer, Fried argues, in a highly specific way: Capturing figures immured in states of obliviousness, in moments of absent unselfconsciousness – ‘forgetting of self ’ – these compositions assimilate the viewer by enabling the ‘supreme fiction’ that the subject of the picture is unaware of being observed (1988: 103). In this way, Fried claims, the absorptive mode generates ‘the fiction of the beholder’s absence or non-existence’ (2008: 341). And this fictive absence encourages the viewer to gaze at the work with a concentration that reflects the entranced unselfconscious absorption of the subject of the work. ‘In absorptive pictures, we are looking at figures who appear not be [sic] “acting out” their world, only “being in it” . . . engaged in an occupation and not paying any attention to, or responding to the fact that he [or, in this case, she] is being observed by, the spectator’ (Wall in Fried 2008: 38). Although Fried’s category relates specifically to French painting in the 1750s, the concept of ‘anti-theatrical’ absorption has, despite his restrictions, general aesthetic applicability (as established for instance in his more recent application of the distinction to the analysis of contemporary photographic practice [Fried 2008]).

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Indeed, the category of absorption has been criticized for its neglect of key earlier instances of absorption in the history of art, such as, paradigmatically, Vermeer. Even though his later philosophical development of absorptive modes in contemporary photography makes no reference to Billingham (and argues, unconvincingly, that it is impossible to properly evoke the absorptive mode in contemporary art), his concept of absorption seems particularly relevant to discussion of this photograph. Consider the mother poring over her jigsaw. Bored, killing time? Another compulsive habit engaged to endure ‘inertia’ and the oppressive emptiness of ‘dead time’ (Baraitser 2017). But, again, isn’t the spirit-crushing monotony and paralysing banality of the scene not contradicted by its fascinating formal complexities? Again, the tension between the antithetical dimensions of the banal and the fascinating in this image accounts for and explains its aesthetic accomplishment. It is as if its subject’s absorption in the puzzle has been transmitted to the surface of the print, crystallizing there as a function of its crazy compositional geometries. And the viewer’s subsequent captivation in its mesmerizing formal detail enacts a simulacrum of its subject’s state of absorption. In the fractal optical detail of the image, itself seeming to vanish in the frozen entropy of articulation and disintegration of the actual puzzle, represents a concise visual enactment of Billingham’s aesthetic achievement. Representing what the artist regards as a ‘little allegory’, an allegory, that is to say, of his artistic intention to realize ‘order in chaos’, precisely what Liz is struggling with in her puzzle: ‘rather than viewing Billingham’s mother Liz doing a jigsaw puzzle as simply a means of filling in time’, Stuart Home comments of this image, ‘she might be seen as wrestling with form and colour in a way that mirrors what goes on in art galleries’ (Home 2000: 45). Clearly the artist’s emotional investment in this work is responsible for its extraordinary effect. This image’s moment of aesthetic transcendence, I would argue, is fundamentally the result of filial attachment being indirectly communicated through intertextual reference to classical absorptive form. If this attachment seems lacking in the content of the work (and in his statements about it) this may be because it has been displaced to, and ultimately condensed in, the fractal complexities of this image. What does this mean? Simply that it is facile to regard Billingham’s exclusive preoccupation with pictorial criteria (composition, framing, symmetry, spatial interrelationships, etc.) and indifference to subject matter as evidence of a distanced (or even exploitative) attitude towards his subjects. Rather his attachment to formal criteria comprises the medium through which his filial intimacy is sublimated (and indirectly expressed). This, indeed, is what I believe is inadvertently revealed in cryptic statements (made, incidentally, when his parents were still alive) like: ‘that’s the real landscape, a landscape of emotions’ (Lingwood 1998b: 54); or when he refers to snapshot photography as a medium of ‘recognition’ prior to expression or communication (Billingham 2018).25 In a review of Billingham’s debut exhibition, Gilda Williams memorably

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remarked on Liz’s ‘rampant sense of decoration’ and, in this slice of filial kinship, her sense of decoration has evidently been inherited by her son. In fact, sublimated in every photograph of the Ray’s a Laugh cycle shown in Sensation, is evidence that Billingham has acquired his mother’s instinct for form and pattern. Is this image not a suitably kaleidoscopic testimonial to the pattern of that heredity? Yet perhaps the most cryptic – and compelling – intertextual references occur in the non–Ray’s a Laugh photographs in the Sensation exhibition, for example, the upright photo of the artist’s father standing in the bedroom with the dog on the bed, its (mangy) back to the viewer (NRAL 1995 [Rosenthal, ed. 1997: 57]) (cover image). Note the teddy bear among the debris in the background seemingly craning around Ray in order to engage the camera, its bright-blue button ‘eyes’, an ironic substitute for the interplay of averted ‘looks’ registered in the photo. Viewers acquainted with the photobook would have recognized the shot as part of a subsequence from Ray’s a Laugh (father with dog in bedroom) (RAL #22 [Plate 14] #43 [Plate 9], #48) (pp. 41, 80–81, 89)26 familiar for its mise en scène of candy-pink walls, metal bedframe and yellow counterpane – and for the psychotropic Salvador Dalí poster pinned to the wall.27 As well as this explicit quotation, compound visual allusions to the two most celebrated British painters of the previous generation, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, are subsumed in this image. Of the five scenes that comprise this subsequence, there is one in the Saatchi collection that, like the jigsaw piece, has become independent of the cycle, namely: the slightly angled snapshot of the dog28 looking up at the handle of the closed, badly scuffed and scratched bedroom door, waiting to be let out, apparently being surveyed by the kitten in the picture above it (NRAL #4 [1996] Plate 15). Although Ray does not appear in this shot, the bedroom interior of this sequence is strongly coded as the father’s personal space, and although the figure-in-room scheme is unmistakably evocative of Bacon (as are the explicitly Baconian motifs of metal bed frame, dog and naked lightbulb) the key reference in this subsequence (as particularly prevalent in this shot) is the pink wallpaper. Even if it appears intermittently in his work, this unique hue of flat household pink is strongly associated with Bacon. Beginning with Painting 1946 it recurs throughout his oeuvre, and is dominant, for example, in Lying Figure (1969), the Portraits of Henrietta Moraes (1969), Self Portrait (1970), and Triptych (1971); the most salient occurrence, in this connection, perhaps ironically, is the background of Study for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sideways) (1971). This is not the only correlation. Look again at the photo of Ray in the room. The flocculent blanket on the bed in Billingham’s photo corresponds in both colour and texture to the foreground of Bacon’s study of Freud. Additionally, Ray’s orientation echoes the ‘sideways’ posture of the figure in the painting, and isn’t there the slightest suggestion of a circumstantial triptych formation in the relationship between the pictures hanging on the wall to either side of his slightly

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stooped form? Sometimes, indeed, the figure in a Baconian tableau is intermeshed with a picture on the wall in the background (Seated Figure, 1974). Finally, the severe, slightly sinister, aquiline shadow around Ray’s profile due to the camera flash adds yet another distinctive Baconian feature to the image (seen for example in the left panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion [1962]). Equally relevant and perceptible, the intertextual references to Lucian Freud in the sequence are perhaps more surreptitious. Although there are indirect allusions to the painter’s many figure-and-animal compositions, especially the studies that include a dog on the bed, such as Pluto and the Bateman Sisters (1996) or even Girl With White Dog (1950–1), the most prevalent reference to Freud is methodical (and pertains to Billingham’s practice generally); it is, namely, that ‘intensity of observation’ peculiar to Freud that is transferred to the signifying surface through the exploratory activity of the prehensile brush. Characterized as involving an Artaudian ‘cruelty of vision’, Brendan Prendeville maintains that Freud’s obsessive process of representation has the effect of consigning his subjects ‘to an abject state’ that somehow becomes inscribed in their depicted physicality as a kind of ‘excessive’ after-effect of the severity of the painter’s gaze (2000: 186). ‘Rather than yielding passively to our gaze’, Prendeville writes, as a result, Freud’s subjects seem to ‘press on it invasively’ (2000: 186). Billingham’s camera, exactly like Freud’s probing brush, becomes an equivalent ‘forensic’ apparatus of examination, a prosthetic extension, used to explore reality understood precisely as a matter of contact with physical materiality. Billingham’s subjects, like Freud’s, appear as though thrust into optical space with an invasive proximity. As an after-effect of this process, in an analogous way to the Freudian visible, we are made conscious of the physiological sensation of seeing, of that borderline-unpleasant sense of vision as ‘tactile experience’, so that ultimately, opticality and physicality seem to coincide somehow on the tangible surface of the work (Mellor 2002: 10). In Billingham’s photography this coincidence occurs in the agonistic focus on anatomy. Seen here topless, the grainy pallor of Ray’s veined and sinewy torso, his ropey arms and their scribbly tattoos,29 the scuffed and scaly texture of his skin, are made palpable to the eye, just as they are, for example, in Freud’s 1993 self-portrait, Painter Working, Reflection. ‘It is unsurprising that Billingham looked hard at the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud while he was a student,’ Searle observes (2000); and here the Guardian critic’s casual comment that Ray Billingham, in appearance and gait, resembles the late British painter is not necessarily facetious (he was no doubt reminded of Freud’s 1993 self-portrait). Rather, in some mysterious sense, this recognition contributes to the strange affinities between Billingham’s snapshot pictorialism and the ‘forensic’ opticality of the later Freud, affinities that become even more evident in his next major work Fishtank (1998).

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Fishtank (1998) The 47-minute single-channel videotape installation Fishtank (1998)30 was commissioned by Artangel in 199731 as a short film for television. First broadcast on BBC2 in December 1998 it was produced by Adam Curtis (and James Lingwood) and edited by the artist with Dai Vaughan. Shot in his parents’ flat in Cradley Heath, Billingham’s home-movie represents a further phase in his postdocumentary interrogation of domesticity. To varying degrees of success, the artist spent six weeks analysing over forty hours of indiscriminate videotape footage before finally compressing the material down to just over three-quarters of an hour of Nouvelle Vague–style content (Billingham 2018). Diverse genres are cited: documentary realism, low-budget found-footage horror, amateur movie diary, wildlife film footage, reality TV, as well as contemporary video art. Yet Fishtank remains importantly immune to classification. Avoiding direct genre influences, the artist manipulates the medium to the utmost level of immersive effect to achieve the convulsive response he desires. More visceral than the snapshots of the Ray’s a Laugh cycle, Fishtank takes the scrutiny of his family to new extremes of intimacy and exposure that make it ‘painful to watch’ (Searle 1999; Buck 1998). Reflecting on his reaction to Billingham’s early photographs, Lewis famously acknowledged ‘feeling an almost physical pain’ (1997: 65).32 But this response has nothing to do with pain in the neurological sense; rather it is related to the oppressive sense of confinement elicited by the claustrophobically immersive nature of the material, with its chronic richness of detail, hysterical mise en scène patterning, nausea-inducing oblique angles and absurd shots. In Fishtank the pain is intensified by the spasmodic movement, the physical interaction of the characters and the dialogue of incessant, bitter arguing. Commenting on the title, Tarantino (rather obviously) suggests that an aquarium is ‘an artificially constructed space . . . built to keep the inhabitants inside and to facilitate the viewing of them from outside.’ Its key characteristic, he adds, ‘is its transparency’ (Tarantino 2000: 85). Most people would be embarrassed to have their family’s closet behaviour exposed in the manner of Fishtank. But from the evidence of the painfully private (behind-closed-doors) material he continually releases into the public domain, Billingham seems content to subject his family to this kind of borderline-voyeuristic observation. With the ‘indifferent curiosity’ of a wildlife enthusiast or behaviourist, he directs his (then newly acquired) camcorder towards the undifferentiated flux circulating in the ecosystem of his parent’s flat.33 The project began by juxtaposing short segments of video to generate small, rhythmic, mosaic-like patterns in approximation of the interrelationships within the family psychodynamic; and this includes the attempt to acknowledge (for the first time) his own relationship with his parents and brother. ‘It’s the way I look at

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them,’ he states of the project’s objective, ‘it’s inherent in that’. But how exactly does he look at them? ‘I look at them,’ he replies defensively, ‘the way you see them in the film’ (in Lingwood 1998b: 55). Fishtank accomplishes the mediation of familial relationships under the optical refraction of his filial perception. ‘The relationships that came out in the film, between my father, mother, brother or me’, he concludes, ‘are inherent to looking through my eye in those ways’ (Billingham 2002). Fishtank is a film of inertia, of suffocating – and hysterical – inactivity, heightened and exacerbated by the awkward hand-held single-camera style. There is neither plot nor narrative; and any diegetic continuity in the film is simply an after-effect of post-production. Informed by the experience of editing Ray’s a Laugh (and influenced by British filmmaker Terence Davies who abandons ‘conventional narrative development’ in favour of generating screen meanings as a function of ‘form and structure rather than any chronological plot’ [Everett 2005: 188]), a similar non-linear method of ‘embedding and enveloping’ is applied to the restructuring of this footage, where distinct sequences are extracted from the unrehearsed and circumstantial raw material, articulated into a montage of sporadic scenes and interspersed with a series of smaller-scale interludes.34 A recursive, cyclical structure is established. Taking up precisely where Ray’s a Laugh left off, Fishtank begins with a dizzyingly low-angle misaligned shot of Billingham’s father. Close-up and from below, inexplicably and disconcertingly inverted relative to the frame, Ray drinks. He puts a cigarette-butt between the lips of his toothless mouth, sparks it and inhales deeply. He drinks again. In the concluding scene of the film, Billingham’s father reappears, recapitulating the opening scene, sitting in an armchair, toothlessly lipsynching, bopping, and humming along to Nancy Sinatra’s ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’35 playing in the darkness somewhere in the off-screen interior. And with that scene the film abruptly ends, only to begin again where it started, on a loop, with those inverted close-up shots of Ray drinking. The initial scenes of Fishtank have, like Ray’s a Laugh, an establishing function. Following the disorienting introduction (Ray again plays the central role) Jason takes over, dancing topless around the flat to generic techno36 with a beermat in each hand, stalking houseflies: ‘Distract ‘im wi’ this one – and [slap!] geddim wi’ this one.’ Holding out the pulverized insect on the edge of the card to the camera, he comments, ‘Ugh . . . Fuck.’ From here we cut abruptly to the next scene. Under a naked lightbulb Ray is giving the fish their night-feed in the flickering glow of the aquarium light. Diffuse colours, red and orange, blur in and out of focus in an abstract dance. Bubbling sounds. ‘One o’ them fishes’, Ray mumbles, ‘was brought back to life.’ Next, Liz is introduced, playing a video-game in the living room, her face suffused with electric-blue light. As she jerks the joystick back and forth, it responds with a series of electronic bleeps and robotic twitters. While Ray mutters away in the background.

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There’s been minimal dialogue so far; but this changes in the next scene. Cut to Jason, lounging on the couch, topless, as the camera slowly lenses his face and the contours of his languid body. ‘Have you heard that Björk, singin’?’ From ‘behind’ the camera Billingham answers, ‘Yeah?’ JASON: All outta key and everyfing? It’s all outta tune . . . BILLINGHAM [out of shot]: What about it? JASON: Oh, that fucken famous, yeah? For singin outta tune . . . ? As the action settles down over the next thirty minutes the subtext is gradually clarified. Billingham is using the camera as a means of exploring his parents’ toxic relationship. It quickly becomes clear that emphasis is placed on the space between the antagonists. What has emerged in the subtext by way of the editing, in other words, is that the film is a means of examining the tense, livid emptiness between Ray and Liz. Billingham often refers to negative space when discussing the importance of composition in his work. In Fishtank (and this point is reasserted by the editing process) it is as if the camera lens, although ostensibly filming indiscriminately, is nevertheless peripherally attracted to (and activated by) negative space. Applied to this live domestic dynamic, that space is the polarized gap between his parents, which when mediated through the camera lens and transposed to the moving image becomes equivalent to the vacant ‘scenic space’ between objects in a composition. Somehow finding a subsidiary focus on this gap, the camera relentlessly pursues it, examining how it’s negotiated and re-negotiated, how his parents relate to each other across it, and how it can suddenly become charged – with spiteful, bitter animosity – and close with a snap.37 Exploration of this interstitial behavioural space informs the thematic arc of Fishtank. Considered as a speculative attempt to convey something of the negative space between his parents, registering its imprint on magnetic tape, I think, is the key to Billingham’s first experimental film. Consider, for instance, the only long shot in the film. From the kitchen his mother is observed, sitting alone watching TV (and seething), in the living room. She shouts across the space to Ray (unseen from her vantage point) hiding in the kitchen (and keeping an eye on her through ‘crack o’ t’door’). Oi! If you’re drinking in there Ray I’ll clobber you! In sympathy with Ray, the camera (i.e. Billingham) is located in the kitchen, ‘hiding’ from Liz, and observing him secrete a (‘10%’) can of Crest from the fridge to his infectious juvenile merriment: ‘Down the ‘atch and bollocks to ‘em all!’ Tracking to the gap between door and its frame, the camera enacts a significant shift to a point-of-view shot in order to spy on Liz in the living room. In this sequence, Ray – trying to hide his drinking from his wife – demonstrates how to

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open a can without detection. He says, ‘It makes a noise . . . if you cough at t’same time.’ Places can on surface and goes to pull ring: ‘Ere, I’ll show you what I mean . . .’ He barks, wolverine-loud, while simultaneously pulling the can-ring to much hilarity from his kitchen audience (including Billingham).38 Over the duration of the video, the theme of arguing parents is persistently embedded and consolidated. RAY: Don’t tell me what to do . . . [incoherent] . . . they used tell me what to do in t’forces . . . LIZ: Ray? If you don’t fucken shuddup, I’ll throw you out that fucken door! Walking to the open door, Ray turns and looks back (as the camera tracks over to him, a young woman with glasses holding a clipboard – a social worker? Council official? – is disclosed at the extreme right of shot). RAY: Oh . . . you can do that maybe cos I’m light. But if I was heavy you couldn’t do it! LIZ: You want me to try? I won’t even open the door. Ray tries to speak, mumbling something incoherent: ‘why just go out somewhere . . . I dunno . . . I don’t tell me what to do . . . all the while . . .’ LIZ: OI! STOPPIT! I’ve had a bastard ‘nough of you today! He leaves the room and Liz follows him into the corridor. The thematic sequence of the parents’ perpetual arguing, although sustained throughout the film, is interwoven with auxiliary, and less extreme (sometimes significantly calmer) observational segments that function to relieve the emotional tension that builds up in the unbearably confined space of the flat. In order of appearance: 1. Weasel-ball toy skittering around the carpet (the way the camera follows

the artificial ‘creature’s’ hyperactive movements anticipates the animals of Billingham’s later Zoo Project [see Chapter 5]);

2. Mother playing with pet snake; 3. Live housefly darting around the stained surface nipping at the remains

of one of Jason’s squashed flies;

4. Liz’s make-up routine (Fig. 3.3); 5. Generic marine wildlife TV documentary (one of many screens in the

film that the camera parasitically assimilates);

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FIGURE 3.3  Fishtank (1998). Dir. Richard Billingham (single channel video 46m 40s), UK: Artangel / BBC2 / Adam Curtis and James Lingwood (make-up routine) (video still).

FIGURE 3.4  Fishtank (1998) (Ray and Liz) (video still).

6. A meditative point-of-view sequence leafing through mother’s

photograph album39 (featuring photo-booth colour images of the young Liz and Ray) (Fig. 3.4);

7. Exterior shot of leafy branches threshing in the blustery winds; 8. A muscularly intense Jason listening expressionlessly to Alvin Stardust’s

‘Wonderful Time Up There’.40

The title derives from the scene where Ray, alone at night, is feeding the fish and mumbling contentedly to himself in the aquarium’s ambient light. Its relative tranquillity is violently interrupted, however, by the argument that breaks out in the subsequent scene. This dispute takes place in the bedroom where, sitting on his side of the bed, Ray is murmuring something incoherent about not receiving his welfare money. And the atmosphere suddenly intensifies. ‘Your money goes on rent!’ his wife snaps back at him. ‘I have to pay it. I’m living here! The flat’s in my name, not anybody else’s! I have to pay rent, electric . . . [almost inaudible “Aw!”

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from Ray]. Gas. Water. Poll Tax.’ She shakes her head angrily. ‘You didn’t know abaht that did you?’ As Ray continues to grumble irritatingly in the background, she completely loses her temper, snarling, as the camera zooms in between her lips, to her clenched teeth (she’s eating her way through a little basket of shellfish): ‘Just shuddup now! Just SHUDDUP! You been goin on like this since bluddy half-past twelve.’ He mumbles something again and, in the first and most obvious of several key (unintentional) alienation effects in the film, Liz addresses Billingham directly: ‘Half-past twelve he started like this, Rich.’ It continues: LIZ: Ray? Will you JUST STOPPIT! . . . You carry on for the next five minutes [she points a threatening finger] I tell you somethin’ tomorrow morning I’m goin down the council and ask them to find you a flat on yer own. Preferably not on this block. RAY [incoherent]: . . . you never gi’ me any money of me dole . . . LIZ: That’s nothing got to do with it Ray? You’d just waste it. Ray? It’d all go on drink and nothin’ else! RAY [incoherent]: Dun matter though does it? LIZ: Yes it does! We’d all be aht on the fucking street! RAY [slurred]: I cud do wha’ I want wi’ it . . . LIZ: We’d all be aht on the FUCKEN STREET if it was left to you! Close-up decrescendo on Ray rubbing his face and chin with his hand; he sighs. Then following two relatively calm interludes – detailed observational sequences of his mother playing with the snake and applying make-up (a painter with her palette, ‘I fancy pink today, somehow’)41 – another more serious fight breaks out in the bedroom. In this scene, Billingham’s camera holds, inspired by Terence Davies’s cinematic style, on the couple sitting on opposite sides of the bed (although Liz is only gradually revealed in the shot as the camera reverse zooms away from its obsessive close-up scrutiny of his father) as they continue to test each other’s nerves. LIZ: Ray. Just shuddup. RAY: Never mind shut up. I’m goin me own way from now on . . . if you don’ like it, you can lump it. . . . LIZ: I don’t like you here. But I’m gonna fucken put up with yer. RAY: [incoherent, inaudible]: It were you . . . from the beginning . . . that made life like this. LIZ: NO it wasn’t! RAY: Course it fkn was! LIZ: IT WAS NOT!

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RAY: You usta say, right, alright, all out we wanna go in their house . . . Course it fkn was! The spiral of arguing, obscure recriminations and mutual cruelties suddenly becomes more hysterical: LIZ: I can’t stand the sight of you anymore. Sorry. RAY: Piss off then and just leave me alone! And so on. The emotional tension in the room gradually increases until finally released in one explosive moment of physical violence from which the camera turns wearily away. Settling on the void screen of a switched-off TV in the bedroom, the shot pulses in and out of focus, leaving the spectator to search for traces of what’s happening off-screen in the reflective surface of the TV screen. But we’re left only with sounds of scuffling and slapping, and Ray’s, ‘PISS OFF! GO ON!’ And Liz’s climactic: ‘Now. Just get out of this house. Don’t come fucken back!’ Absorbed in their senseless quarrelling, Billingham’s parents seem completely oblivious to the unobtrusive witness in their room. Indeed, we need to remind ourselves that Billingham is there in the bedroom. Yet as soon as we do, we realize that we knew this already. Even as his parents lose control (along with awareness of their son) we find with a shock that we never really lost awareness of his implicit presence. Nevertheless, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept his being there. Yet even if totally inconspicuous, is it ever possible to remain completely unaware of the presence of the photographer? This state of ambiguous presence (an ectopic state, more precisely, of ‘non-absence’ rather than directly registered presence) is brilliantly captured by Lisa Liebmann in a comment apropos Nan Goldin when she claims that the photographer’s ‘insidiously intimate presence in the room’ remains conspicuous (by its absence) (2002: 123). Following this sequence in the bedroom, the turning point of Billingham’s film occurs. ‘I’m going,’ Ray says, ‘and don’t worry. . . . there’s no way I’m comin back. No way’. To which a deflated Liz replies, softly, ‘I don’t want you back.’ From here we cut to Billingham’s father standing dejectedly in the shadows of the bedroom, whistling almost inaudibly to himself. He looks like he’s ready to leave, he’s got his Harrington jacket on, but he doesn’t move. Instead he stands there swaying gently in the shadows as the camera shifts suddenly to an acute low angle until in the gloom he’s just a thin silhouette against the wallpaper. He finally moves around; and, in an inverted shot that recalls the opening scene, opens the bedroom door: ‘I don’t like this kind of living, I don’t.’ And with that he leaves the room. Near the end of the film there is a final compound scene (in fact two segued segments) of his parents in the bedroom. In the slipstream of the squabbling, verbal abuse, passive-aggressive behaviour and actual physical violence that we

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have witnessed (both on- and off-camera) and that we have inured ourselves to expect from their volatile relationship, Ray is back in the bedroom, sitting on the bed in the evening sunlight. Dust twinkles audibly in the intense light as we prepare for another altercation. ‘The news is on now,’ Ray says softly to the sound of an internal door opening. He turns. ‘I said the news is coming on any minute .  .  . twenty-five past.’ Liz enters eating an uncut sandwich and sits on the bed. Detaching itself from Ray, the camera focuses on Liz, zooming up very close to her masticating mouth (a recurrent motif). Now seemingly exhausted, they speak tenderly to each other as she lies down on the bed beside him and lays her head on his chest (Plate 16). She burps. ‘Pardon me.’ With a brief tableau of the couple on the bed together in the evening sun, the scene comes to an end. This is the final complete sequence in the film and, in relation to the theme of the parents arguing (irritating each other, bitterly quarrelling, shouting, actually fighting) our expectations of conflict are deliberately reversed. With this unexpectedly sympathetic scene, a phantom resolution takes shape in the material; and, with it, the ghost of a three-part structure is conjured. First disrupted then resolved, the underlying state of equilibrium intimated in the subtext of this deceptively disjunctive film, in the end, brings the negative space between the protagonists to ephemeral closure in a rare moment of closeness. Equilibrium is restored (temporarily) in the final tableau of the couple on the conjugal bed. We already referred to Hornby’s perceptive observation42 that, more than ‘an analysis of social despair’, Billingham’s work can be viewed as the ‘portrait of a marriage’ with the artist ‘at pains to show that this marriage has its moments of calm domesticity’ (Hornby 2001: 227). Despite this, the novelist nevertheless notices Ray’s distant expression, his gaze focused ‘somewhere in the middle distance, and you wonder what he has seen’ (Hornby 2001: 229).

Insidious-intimate presence What shocks us most about Billingham’s work, Martin Maloney writes, ‘is the level of intimacy he can put into a raw documentary style’ (2000: np). This seems especially true of Fishtank which, as considered, involves moments of such intense privacy that the artist’s presence in the room, as considered, becomes almost unacceptable. This weird sense of presence (or more accurately behind-the-camera ‘absence’) relates, as Tarantino observes, to our awareness that only family could tolerate the ‘privileged access’ necessary for acquiring such footage – ‘it could only be a family member,’ he says, ‘who could break that barrier’.43 But the intimacy achieved in Fishtank is above all a function of the immersive nature of the medium. The hand-held home-movie camera inscribes the spectator into the mise en scène in a highly specific and atypical way. Anticipating the found-footage genre44 the

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spectator is sutured into ‘scenic space’ (Cousineau 1990) without concession to the (voyeuristic or omniscient) externalism conventionally associated with cinematic spectatorship. Made conscious of the perceptual limits of the video camera, access to the visible is radically circumscribed, and this provokes the anxious sensation of being inside a tense situation that we have no control over. Embedded in the space enfolding us, any viewing pleasure, voyeuristic or otherwise, is excluded. Less fly-on-wall than fly-in-fly-bottle, the spectator of Fishtank is inserted into an environment that somehow seems too small to contain its inhabitants.45 ‘The flat is such a small place to be in,’ Billingham concedes, ‘you are physically close to each other’ (1998: 58). It is necessary to point out that this is, of course, a key effect of the mode of presentation. The restrictions of the camera are accentuated by the televisual channel of mediation; the intense intimacy achieved in this footage is reemphasized by the small-screen’s penetration of private domestic space (which replicates the camera’s insidious presence in the space). Combining connotations of familial social nucleus (inverted to comedic effect in the sit-com Royle Family), of routinized escapist entertainment, channel of mass communication and domestic appliance, the television set positions the viewer in a manner quite distinct from the cinematic spectator. Self-reflexive gestures towards the medium’s rich associations are scattered throughout Fishtank (with its self-conscious exploration of his family’s multiple interactions with the small screen). Affinities between aquarium and television set are invoked in recognition of the medium’s affinity with genres of social realism which, as Samantha Lay comments, seem ‘more suited to the private world of the home via the television than the oversized, fantasy world of the cinema’ (Lay 2002: 120). Yet Billingham’s film involves something of a reversal of the televisual imaginary from channel of access into portal of penetration of private space. But the limitations of the medium make us conscious perhaps of being too close; brought too close, that is, not to the actual people themselves (obviously) but rather to the experience of otherness itself, that which Slavoj Žižek, in a discussion of Kieślowski’s cinematic style, calls the traumatic confrontation with (the other’s) intimacy – an ethical limit which we feel should not be transgressed (2001: 73). ‘The point here’, Searle comments, ‘is you are actually stuck in the flat with Billinghams for 45 minutes [sic] and it feels like half a lifetime’ (Searle 1999). Although minimal space is afforded for the viewer to ‘observe’ or ‘register’ the content, there is an equally disquieting distance involved in the scenic framing of his family in Fishtank, a point of forensic indifference from which his subject is examined, and according to which his family is exposed – without explanation, without judgement, yet also without defence – to the lens. Exposure, as Levinas argues,46 is nakedness. And in Fishtank Billingham’s family is denuded by the lens, offered up to it, submitted to view in unprotected presence: made irreducibly there, Ray, Liz and Jason Billingham are doubly exposed – their ‘physiological materiality’

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somehow violating the effort of screen space to contain them (Kundera 2009: 12).47 This ambivalent mode of representation is emphasized by Billingham’s camera practice which, alternating between awkward hand-held footage and detached exploratory analysis of form, generates an agitative tension suspended between the incompatible ontologies of ‘intimacy’ and ‘distance’ (Tarantino 2000: 87). In response to inquiry concerning his idiosyncratic camera practice in Fishtank Billingham acknowledged that, although physically close to the subject during filming, very little can be perceived through the apparatus itself. ‘The camcorder I have’, he explains, ‘is relatively old and simple, the picture you see through the viewfinder is very small, and it’s black and white and often quite abstract’ (1998: 55–8). Yet elsewhere he claimed (apropos Fishtank) that these precise mechanical restrictions inspired him to ‘hold on things – a head, a mouth, the sky . . . – for long periods’ (Billingham 2002). A technique that intensifies emotion, the long hold is associated with Terence Davies (Billingham 2018).48 Applied most conspicuously in his early 16-mm trilogy of sombre autofictional poetic-realist films, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) Davies’s austere (monochromatic) style has been described as ‘sculptural’ (with reference to his vestigial illumination of the face in surrounding darkness).49 Composed of almost-still tableaux shaped of a cold light, ‘luminous and stark’ (Jarman [1994] 2008: 1) Davies’s practice evokes emotion through the tension generated between distance and intimacy in the shot: ‘if the medium is used’, Billingham remarks, ‘for the opposite of what it was intended’, it creates tension and this, in turn, elicits emotion. ‘In Davies’, he concludes, ‘the camera holds and it builds tension’ (Billingham 2018).50 Billingham acknowledges the influence of Davies on his work. He discovered the Trilogy prior to filming Fishtank and suggests that this may have ‘encouraged him to hold on situations for an even longer time’ (1998: 55). Confessing to being profoundly affected by these films, he says, ‘It was like seeing his memories, the way the camera seems to hold, to linger: just one hold, after another hold, after another’ (1998: 55). Recall, for instance, the protracted scene in the first film Children, where the young Tucker (Davies’s surrogate protagonist) is sitting beside his mother on the bus home and, as he looks out the top-deck window, she, soundlessly, begins to cry. This scene, which Davies now believes to be ‘audaciously long’ (and ‘far too exposed’), is over two minutes’ duration; but it is a perfect example of his idiosyncratic application of the technique. Interest here is not in the emotional intensity of the scene per se but on the shifting chiaroscuro in the bus as it travels through the precincts of the city. A flickering effect of light and shade is relied on to evoke the intimate mood complexes in the interior of the bus which precisely performs (as Lay puts it in a different context) ‘a tension in the spectator between intimate involvement and critical distance’ (Lay 2002: 113). This technique of emotional displacement is explored more confidently and succinctly in the later

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two films. In sequences that seem completely dissociated from diegetic imperative, the solitary middle-aged Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan) is sitting still (paralysed with memories or guilt) as the world circulates indifferently around him.51 The way Billingham interprets and employs Davies’s techniques in his own practice (especially in Fishtank) is highly eccentric. His process often makes the camera seem as if it is independently detaching itself from exposition to examine the space on its own. ‘The best footage’, Billingham remarks, ‘was when I’d just been looking and not really thinking (trance-like) so that the camcorder was more an extension of the eye’ (2002). Reference to ‘extension of the eye’ indicates an exploratory approach. Yet Billingham’s treatment of the camera suggests extension of body more than eye: the camera ceases to be an apparatus of observation that renders accessible what is normally unrevealed to ordinary vision,52 but becomes, rather, an investigative device for exploring the environment at a remove from the observer. Relied on in reduced perceptual circumstances, like an antenna, or in the absence of direct perception, like an endoscope, the lens extends or transcends the boundaries of unmediated perception. It is as if the artist needs to see something and is manipulating the lens in a heuristic manner, like a detector, to grope around in the darkness in order to discover the hidden problem. Watch again as at certain key points in Fishtank the camera disconnects itself from the process of recording. The camera seems, that is, to twist itself away from the passive registering of the flux in front of it in order to independently explore the interior. Encountering whatever it bumps into as ‘a series of external stimuli’, as Alexander Trocchi (1960: 32) writes of the experience of physicality in Cain’s Book, feeling ‘the shock of impression’, the lens moves up extremely close to its stimuli, anatomizing them into a succession of fragmentary forms: mouths, nostrils, neckwattle, lumpy chin-stubble, granular membranes, brittle hair follicles, perspiring moles, the tiny electrified hairs on a forearm, the veins pulsing in the back of a hand. Whether inspecting a translucent epidermis cracked with crow’s-feet or a glossy cornea swivelling between twitching eyelashes, Billingham’s sentient camera prowls ‘at the ecstatic edge of something to be known’ (Trocchi 1960: 32; in McCarthy 2014: 22). Motivated, according to Richard Cork, by the impulse to get as close as possible to his father, we witness the lens in Fishtank travelling insatiably over Ray’s ‘features, staring up his nostrils and revealing every fissure and furrow in his pallid skin’ until the focus malfunctions and everything goes indistinct and fuzzy (Cork 2003: 37). Perhaps excessive to cite Lucian Freud’s provocative disclosure that he regarded his subjects ‘as animals’ in this context (in Mellor 2002: 9),53 Billingham’s attitude to his parents (mediated through the lens), however uncomfortable it may be to acknowledge, is compatible with Freud’s cold and cruelly detached (zoological?) gaze (Guilding 2019: 9). But only to the extent that it is animated by an equivalent obsessive commitment to ‘optical empiricism’ as that pursued by Freud (and

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Trocchi) (Stremmel 2004: 20). The exploratory camera in Fishtank is informed, that is, by an ‘interrogative intimacy’ closely related both to Freud’s ‘forensic’ realist practice and to Trocchi’s ‘spatial sensibility’ that itches to explore the ‘edge of things’ and, like a ‘piece of sensitive photographic paper’, wants to feel the impression of intransigent reality on its skin (Mellor 2002: 9; McCarthy in Trocchi 1960: vii). Indeed, here, Prendeville’s description of Freud’s brush as ‘insinuating’ itself into the cracks and under the seams of reality appears particularly apropos to the kind of intimate yet invasive contact Billingham’s lens seeks to make with the Real in Fishtank. In a creepy yet mesmeric scene of the video, occurring approximately twenty minutes in, Billingham’s mother is seen charming her pet snake. As the lens follows the slender form, it undulates in whip-like strokes across his mother’s upper arms, chest, neck and shoulders, through her hair and over her face (Fig. 3.5). She enjoys handling the reptile, controlling it. Almost trance-like, she directs it, and centres it on her body. It seems to respond when she touches the black bulb of its head. This scene reflexively identifies the appropriate metaphor for Billingham’s camera practice. Stealing up from an oblique angle – or approaching from behind and stealthily advancing over the surface – Billingham’s camera assumes a snakelike, reptilian intentionality, insinuating itself sinuously into every interstice and margin of its environmental niche, exploring everything it encounters therein. Here the salient reference is neither Freud nor Davies nor Trocchi but, more prosaically, the ubiquitous wildlife documentary film which typically includes ‘point-of-view footage’ of a creature’s passage through its environment. ‘All four of us’, Billingham declared when discussing Fishtank, ‘watch wildlife programmes. There’s often a wildlife documentary going on the background, and it seems interesting to me that I’m watching them watching some wildlife film’ (1998: 58). The particular camera device in question exploits the semiotics of cinematic

FIGURE 3.5  Fishtank (1998) (snake) (video still).

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montage to reproduce the illusion of the viewpoint of the observed species (the creature snuffling through its habitat or ‘stalking’ its prey). Billingham was, in fact, challenged about this link between his practice and naturalist camera-technique when it was pointed out to him that the subjects of a wildlife documentary are generally not aware of the camera. ‘Neither’, he answered, ‘are my family really’.

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4

OUTSIDE

Black Country (1997–2003) / Landscapes (2001–3) Part One: Black Country The Ikon show As the twentieth century ended Billingham was exhibiting extensively and internationally. Solo shows in Europe and the United States in 1997 were succeeded by an exposé of new works at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery.1 That year he also received the Deutsche Börse (formerly Citibank) award for photography,2 and his international profile was enhanced by the migration of Sensation to New York and Berlin. Photographs appeared in several other curated shows across the European area and North America during this period. In 1999 important solo exhibitions opened in Brussels, Frankfurt and Rome.3 A comprehensive, career-defining exhibition was being planned for the new millennium. Intended as a definitive survey, this ambitious event would represent, to all intents and purposes, an early retrospective for a contemporary artist still technically at the beginning of his career. Curated by Jonathan Watkins (with an extensive catalogue critique by the late Michael Tarantino) the show – simply titled Richard Billingham – opened at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham on 7 June 2000 (travelling to Dublin, Brno and Göteburg). A truly all-encompassing curriculum vitae, the Birmingham show embraced seldom-seen work from Billingham’s earliest monochrome period (1990) alongside more recent experimental video pieces, such as the monitor sequence

Liz Smoking (1998) and the video projection Tony Smoking Backwards (1998). Prints from the Ray’s a Laugh series appeared alongside Fishtank, and composite videogenic stills from his home-movie footage, massively enlarged, were juxtaposed with (now celebrated) works from the Saatchi collection. Certain colour snapshots from the family series were included that hadn’t been exhibited before (photos of his father sitting topless on the couch stroking the cat, of the Dimplex electric fire, of the cat reaching up on hind legs to nuzzle the dog). Curation of this Sensationera work with the latest moving-image projections of his sleeping father Ray in Bed (1999) and Playstation (1999) – a short film of his brother’s adrenalized fingers playing a video game4 – was revelatory, leading to widespread critical acclaim and ultimately occasioning the artist’s nomination for the most prestigious accolade in British art, the Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 2001 (it was awarded, some believe unfairly, that year, to Martin Creed).5 Included in the Ikon exhibition was what was described as ‘a recent series of urban landscapes’ (Watkins 2000) taken between 1992 and 1997 of the townscape of Cradley Heath.6 Printed at a scale of 92 cm × 76 cm and framed behind glass, they were distinguished from the rest of the display by being the only photos taken outside the tower block flat.7

Zero-degree aesthetic: Cradley Heath (1992–7) Most perplexing about this work was not its exteriority, paradoxically, but its ordinariness. Not to be confused with artistic ordinariness – that is, the ordinary made ‘extraordinary’ through aesthetic de-familiarization (these images ‘don’t yield to that cliché’) – this was just ordinary uninteresting ordinariness, ordinariness in the benign, inartistic, homespun sense. Yet weirdly, in their ‘deliberate ordinariness’, as Prudence Peiffer writes of the work of US photographer William Eggleston, these indifferent images nevertheless ‘startle us – as if we have suddenly seen the pattern from our childhood-bedroom wallpaper’ (2016: 39). With Eggleston’s comparable ‘scenes of nothing’ we seem somehow compelled to search the visual tautology (i.e. this is [a photograph of] a backyard) for what Benjamin memorably called that inconspicuous ‘spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject’ (1999a: 510). Images of no obvious interest, Billingham’s exterior studies challenge the viewer to inspect them closely, as if there’s something (we’re) missing, until, as their emptiness becomes elemental – and eerie – we realize, with a shock, that what’s missing is inscribed as an active, coercive force in the core of the insignificant image. This series originated in dissatisfaction with the response to his family photographs. Disillusion with the tendency of viewers (and critics) to focus

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disproportionately on the sensationalist features of his pictures while remaining oblivious to their evident aesthetic qualities occasioned an interim re-evaluation of his aesthetic objectives. ‘I quickly came to realise that most people only saw the surface of the images, such as my mum’s tattoos or the carnivalesque wallpaper, or the type of knickknacks on display, or the dirt on the floor or whatever’ Billingham says. ‘It was like the audience was leering at this other world. I don’t think most people saw any of the beauty underneath or how well the pictures were composed’ (in Gardner 2009: 55). So the motivation of this project was negative: to make pictures that ‘stripped away any hint of sensational subject matter but would remain very good photographs’. He adds: The most boring subject I could think of was the area where I grew up, so I began to photograph those spaces in the same snapshot style as the earlier work. These photographs were much harder to take than the family ones because I was essentially trying to photograph ‘nothing’ . . . (BILLINGHAM in GARDNER 2009: 55)

Nothing? Bill Brandt’s photographs of the built environment sometimes show nothing more than an empty street. In A Snicket, Halifax (1937), for instance, an unremarkable old cobbled backstreet ginnel leads to a factory yard. But Brandt’s ‘tableaux’ are intentionally and conspicuously composed with a redemptive aim, to exceed the ordinariness of ‘mere appearance’ and disclose the ‘latent magic’ hidden in the ‘everyday’ (Warburton 2005: 61). Exaggerating the monochromatic contrasts of his prints, Brandt deliberately motivates dramatic, expressionistic effects to make a prosaic alleyway seem epic. Likewise, the unpeopled street photography of Thomas Struth (influenced by Atget’s empty Parisian street scenes) compensate for their lack of presence by engaging an architectonic complexity that is downright anthropomorphic in its indirect reference to human life. Harry Gruyaert’s photographs depict insignificant events that somehow retain sufficient iconographic information to avoid being nothing. But Billingham’s photos of his home town depict, in fact, nothing. Delete the human figures from a Gruyaert,8 expunge the sophisticated ghost-town style from a Struth, and erase the epic from a Brandt, and almost nothing becomes actually nothing and this condition brings us closer to the zero-degree aesthetic of a Billingham Cradley Heath townscape. Clandestine snapshots taken within a very small radius of the mid-terrace house on Sidaway Street, the artist’s family home before they relocated to the high-rise council estate, these images of Billingham’s childhood habitat epitomize his (anti) aesthetic of the ‘indecisive moment’. Loitering near a suggestive locale, some ‘nondescript’ place that epitomized what he ‘wanted to capture’ (an involuntary childhood memory) the artist would delay until ‘no cars or people were going by’,

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furtively raise his camera and quickly ‘take the picture’ (Billingham 2018; in Gardner 2009: 56). Bereft of human presence, the deserted streets make the town – with its abandoned cars – seem forsaken, as if evacuated following an outbreak. Their eeriness is not post-apocalyptic, however (like the post-Chernobyl photographs of Pripyat for example), but more prosaic, reminiscent of the opening scene of the neozombie movie 28 Days Later . . . (Boyle 2002) – if lacking, perhaps, its oneiric effect. Yet aren’t these pictures of absence haunted by a sensation more pervasive than anything that could be achieved by the straightforward erasure of human presence? Recall Edward Hopper’s empty sunlit streets and lonesome townhouses. Aren’t Billingham’s photos of his West Midlands town equally ‘lonely or tragic in their implication’ (Zigrosser 1962)? But isn’t there also a distinct localized naivety about these photos (more Lowry than Hopper)? ‘Half-past three in the afternoon and no resources at no particular time of year’, Christopher Neve remarks of Lowry’s uneventful Salford townscapes. And Billingham’s town looks as if seen while waiting at a bus stop on Sunday, where everything seems hungover and washed-out, an ‘unsettled greyish-white, the colour of nothing at all’ (1990: 106). In these pictures, focus is again directed towards negative space. But Billingham’s intention to take ‘photographs of nothing’ (in Tarantino 2000: 86) at no particular time of day is given a critical twist by the photographic act whereby this nothingness is crystallized in a salient absence that eclipses the content of the picture. The negative articulation of the absence objectified in these pictures, contradictorily, implies a presence. Roy Exley (1998) has studied the paradoxical attempt to objectify absence in the practice of contemporary artists such as Luisa Lambri, Catherine Yass and Rachel Whiteread, attributing this aesthetic interest in zones of ‘desertion or exclusion’ to a post-minimalist fascination with the latent existential potential of empty space. In such ‘sites of absence’, he observes, the ‘absent object’ is summoned ‘anew’ and the emptiness reactivated ‘with a prevailing sense of loss’ (Exley 1998: 66). Billingham’s emotionally neutral photos of Cradley Heath explore a compatible preoccupation with activating absence, where ‘intuition conjures up’ a residual presence and evokes a ‘petrified’ (Engberg 2007) and pervasive sense of loss. The artist, at the time, was still very much attached to the area (he owned a red-brick Victorian townhouse in Stourbridge about four kilometres away from Cradley Heath [Chesshyre 2001]9) yet he was beginning to accept that he would need to leave the region in order to accelerate his career. He was, however, finding it very difficult to forsake the ‘emotional security’ associated with the place (Billingham 2018). And this ambivalence imbues his imagery with a strange, expressive subtext, as if the painful process of separation is being unintentionally conveyed at a less explicit formal level in the photos. ‘To me’, he says, these ‘pictures embody that longing and sense of imminent loss rather than try to communicate some kind of human presence’ (in Gardner 2009: 56). Filmmaker Terence Davies comments on the way childhood memories become activated by the thisness of

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inconsequential details (such as patches of dried grass in freshly cut verges), and in these photos, we witness Billingham retrace his boyhood routes round his former family home in Sidaway Street, seeking to reactivate elusive personal emotional connections in such things as the inauspicious pattern of cracks in a school yard pavement, the tracks of pock-marks in a telegraph pole, a useless doorway in a high brick wall, or the peeling bark of an urban tree. In 2004, in preparation for a review of this work, Jonathan Watkins visited Cradley Heath. Employing the photos as an aide-memoire, with the artist as guide, he takes a kind of Dantesque derive through the town, pausing en route at the locations of the series. Less a trip down amnesia lane, more like the stations of a profane via dolorosa, it reads: Trinity and Sidaway Streets, off Mace Street. Claremont Street, Lawrence Lane, Pearson and Petford Streets, Elbow and King Streets, both between Halesowen Road and the Old Hill High Street. Plant Street and Ave Maria Close. Clyde Street and Bearmore Road leading to the Bearmore Playing Fields, adjacent to Spinners End Industrial Estate. Peartree Lane leads to a railway tunnel, and beyond that is the Codsall Estate. (2004: 39)

Watkins is led by his guide through the most colourless and uninspiring places.

The Cradley Heath dead zone Passing rows of slate rooftops behind red-brick walls, aerials and tall chimneys, under a uniformly greyish sky, he is shown backyards, empty building sites, disused carparks and factory bays enclosed by bricked-up entrances and whitewashed walls with fading graffiti-tags. Broken concrete pavements at a blind end-ofterrace corner open to a fenced-off cul-de-sac. Here a melancholy dead end, there a crooked queue of bollards leading to squat factory outbuildings (Untitled [Day] ##1-26 [1997]) (Plate 17). Layers of terraced housing pack out the middle distance where the line of visibility is met with a vanishing point somewhere in the distant hills beyond, offering ‘no visible means of escape’10 (Untitled [Day] #4 1997) (Fig. 4.1). Corrugated industrial roofing covers windowless red-brick installations; faint tyre-tread tracks and eroded markings delineate the junction at the bend of a road (Untitled [Day] #5 1997). On, past parked cars, looking over waste-ground to the back of a plastered terrace with its capillary network of drainpipes (Untitled [Day] #2 1997), we see walkways with stick-figure telegraph poles and lines of leaning lampposts framed by crumbling asphalt avenues where feral trees grow out of loosened pavingstones (Untitled [Day] #8 1997). A deserted playground with its corroded climbing

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FIGURE 4.1 Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #4 (1997). Colour photograph (75 × 92 cm).

frame and cast-iron roundabout holds, in its haunting vacancy, a particular pathos (Untitled [Day] #20) (Fig. 4.2);11 a sky-blue Robin Reliant parked beside a fire exit: a past epoch’s idea of the futuristic (Untitled [Day] #6 1997). Flagstones, manholes, grates and drains, iron railings, fenced enclosures, a dusty embankment with a pathway leading nowhere, black shuttered shop-windows at the RSPCA (closed), and (empty) school playgrounds (Untitled ##7, 18, 5 1997). A street bench missing its seat slats set up only to view a blind cul-de-sac with a caravan leaning against a high end-terrace wall (Untitled [Day] #8 1997). Rust-coloured ferns and wild flowers grow out of gaps in the distressed mortar. Junkyard trees cower under leaden skies. A stilled moment of brief commotion in the park’s grass arena: a line of trees combed back by a sudden breeze (Untitled #16 1997). The vaguely menacing tunnel under the railway line (Untitled [Day] #10 1997) (Plate 17) beneath which the young Richard passed a thousand times on errands for his mum, or to visit his Uncle Lol at his grandmother’s house, represents, for the artist, a ‘short cut’ from Old Hill to Cradley Heath (Billingham 2018). Having all the metaphysical loneliness of a Hopper painting (specifically, the

FIGURE 4.2 Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #20 (1997). Colour photograph (75 × 92 cm).

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desolate railway tunnel of Approaching a City [1946] which it echoes in subject, composition and mood) this picture’s circumstantial red-brick, gloomy greens and pallid sky reciprocate the American painter’s restrained palette (especially the way they conspire to accentuate its chasm-like darkness). But where Hopper’s railroad conjures an existential lonesomeness, almost surreal in its implication, Billingham’s tunnel is simply – and almost irredeemably – dismal. Revealingly, the tower blocks do not appear in any of the images (OK, they’re just about visible in the distance in one or two of them – and there’s that ironic Brandtesque photograph of the tubular guardrail of the steps leading up between them) yet even though they don’t feature directly in any specific image, not unlike Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s famous print cycle, their oppressive monolithic forms are discernible everywhere.12 If the Riddins Mound tower blocks somehow remain just out of view, their presence is nevertheless sensed, hulking in the penumbra of every picture. A final observation: as well as the absence we’ve made so much of in this series, Billingham’s focus is directed repeatedly to the fault-lines where wilderness is reclaiming the built environment. Zones where feral vegetation is pulsing through a cracked pavement, or where a grid of flagstones has been disrupted by muscular tree-roots, or to vacant parking lots where desiccated grasses have sprouted from fissures, and where weeds and blighted wild flowers have invaded the verges, or to the foundations of a red-bricked wall where tufty lines of foliage are poking through the seams in the asphalt pavement. Everywhere, it seems, pungent nature is bursting through, like a slow-moving subterranean invasion, breaching the ill-planned architectonic of the town. A reminder of the futility of controlling the irrepressible, Billingham’s town is no palimpsest of dead urbanist styles, but a fragile topography with an entropic, primal energy slowly mushrooming beneath it. Neither utopia nor full-blown dystopia: the true subject of these pictures is the subtopia – the mal-planned, unsightly outskirts of declining townland, what Gil Doron calls the dead zone of the urban landscape, located in non-specific places ‘between zones of activity . . . spaces devoid of programme or form’ (Doron 2008: 207). Like an unquiet spirit haunting these spaces, Billingham cannot stop returning to Cradley Heath, to ‘these pathways, these places where he walked as a boy’ (Watson 2004: 44). Gardner, in the same vein, notes the artist’s ambiguous presence in these images which, ‘like a photographic spectre’, lingers in the peripheral vision of each shot (2009: 59),13 the phantom of a boy, endlessly wandering the terrain vague after school, deferring the moment when he must return home.

Black by Day, Red by Night: Black Country (1997–2003) On the eve of the Ikon exhibition Billingham met Sylvia King (then) CEO of The Public, a community arts organization (funded by the Arts Council) located in West

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Bromwich.14 King, originally from the West Midlands, was particularly interested in the Cradley Heath townscapes and expressed an interest in collaborating with the artist on a related future project under the auspices of The Public. Recognizing the important artistic departure that the series prefigures, she acknowledged the artist’s post-Sensation anxiety about being pigeonholed, and they discussed the process of transition away from the sensationalist aesthetic with which he had become inadvertently identified (King 2004: 7–8).15 As part of an ambitious arts programme (The Wonders) managed by The Public in advance of its relocation to a spectacular new build in the centre of West Bromwich, she commissioned the artist to produce a body of work in response to his connection with the West Midlands and based on his photographs of Cradley Heath. King says: ‘We asked Richard to simply dream up something about this place we call the Black Country’ (2004: 8). Extending westward from Birmingham and incorporating the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall – and including a section of Wolverhampton – the Black Country is delineated less by geopolitical borders than by the industrial consumption of natural resources. During the Industrial Revolution it became one of the heaviest (and most economically thriving) regions in England; alongside coal mining and anthracite coking, it was home to steel mills and iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks and world-renowned metal fabrication, chain- and nail-making production.16 ‘No rivers, hills or county lines’, Ian Peddie writes, ‘define the boundaries of that area of the West Midlands known as the Black Country’ (Peddie 2006: 132). Socalled because of the polluting effects of heavy mechanization and excavation on the landscape during industrialization, the Black Country is home to the broadest coal seam in Europe: the thirty-foot or ten-yard seam; and many of the region’s towns are established on exposed coalfield (including Cradley Heath, Old Hill and Dudley).17 Typically represented as a satanic realm of furnaces and mills, the area is associated with slagheaps, coal-pits, buildings’ brickwork black with soot and grime. An 1851 railway compendium described the Black Country as a place where ‘perpetual twilight reigns during the day and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a firey glow’ (Samuel Sidney [1851; 2015] in Edwards 2018: 7). But the epithet itself is attributed to nineteenth-century American diplomat Elihu Burritt who, in 1868, summoned up the region in the incantatory phrase ‘black by day, red by night’ (in Conduit 2017). More recently, following decades of deindustrialization, mass unemployment (and urban regeneration power-hosing), the Black Country epithet has become a misnomer. Yet it has been reclaimed by the post-industrial generation as a designator of distinct provincial identity. And the region is now notoriously associated with the emergence of heavy metal music and the hirsute hard rock subculture that regards the region as something of a dark mecca (vocalist of Led Zeppelin Robert Plant hails from West Bromwich and first-generation metal band Black Sabbath formed in Birmingham in 1968).18 In a revisionist critique of Black Country

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metal subculture, musicologist Ian Peddie (2006) writes that the territory remains overshadowed by the Industrial Revolution: yet ‘its contemporary image’, he says, is still indelibly identified in popular imagination with that industrial heritage (2006: 132). Arguing against the reductive vocabulary standardly applied to discussion of the regional origins of heavy metal culture, however, he claims that if the critical ground under which the Black Country has been viewed was prepared by legions of writers eager to emphasise the area’s desolation it is but a short step to argue that such an area nurtured a culture that reflected the essence of its character. (PEDDIE 2006: 133)

Typically, this discourse is informed by what he calls the ‘rhetoric of escape’, the invariable assumption of which is that ‘One escapes the Black Country’: it is somewhere you are always preparing to depart from (2006: 133). And that its attendant culture (a form of music that invokes its hard, brutalist, industrial, satanic, and paranoid topological features) provides the means of social emancipation from its throwback ‘Dickensian stew’. In Chapter 2 we analysed the establishing shot of Ray’s a Laugh (an aerial view of Cradley Heath) as suggestive of the escape theme, arguing that, with this image, Billingham activates a key convention of British social realism (‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’); but it does so, we maintained, only to motivate the sensation of being inside the confined space of the flat, such that the sense of emancipation evoked by the expansive exterior beyond the window is intensified into an instinct to leap out of the oppressively confined interior and into the wide open space beyond the window.19 Billingham eventually left the area in the early 2000s. And his emancipation, ironically, proved highly enabling, coinciding with the realization of his artistic identity, allowing him the breathing space to embrace his metier with a renewed confidence. In 2003, however, he revisited the West Midlands to complete The Public commission. Hardly a restatement of Hoggart’s trope of the ‘scholarship boy’ (social mobility through education) returning to his home town, looking with ‘jaundiced eyes at the habits and practices of working-class life made strange’ (Hoggart [1957] 2009; in Lovell 1996: 162)20 Billingham returned to town, nevertheless, as a ‘professional’ photographer in complete command of his medium; his phantasy of becoming a painter finally exorcized, prepared to actualize what he had dreamt up about the Black Country in the meantime (Billingham 2018).

The Cradley Heath nocturamas Perhaps subconsciously influenced by Burritt’s expression ‘Black by Day, Red by Night’,21 Billingham’s plan was to take nocturnal photographs of the same locations

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as the original (late 1990s) diurnal snapshots – a project which involved certain technical challenges (now embraced with new assurance). Waiting until dark, the artist set out for his former haunts armed with high-quality, medium-format camera, tripod and cable-release (Billingham 2018). In the nocturnal photographs, the spontaneity of his former snapshot approach is eclipsed by a patient and knowing technical procedure. The Black Country publication (2004) which resulted from Billingham’s collaboration with The Public is informed again by a kind of Blakean innocence-experience duality: publishing the naïve 1997 snapshots in a separate section of the photobook preceding the large-scale 2003 night-time images emphasizes the earlier pictures’ awkward ingenuousness relative to the pictorial sophistication of the later work. Although attention to questions of composition and framing (as we have seen) is a consistent feature of Billingham’s practice, such formal implications are combined in the Black Country nocturnal series with a new patience and procedural control that has critical significance for its distinctive aesthetic. Shooting in conditions of semidarkness requires prolonged exposure times, and, in addition to the distorting chromatic effects of the ambient street lighting, this lends an uncanny cinematic quality to the subsequent imagery that is comparable to the work of directorial photographers such as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson (and, arguably, Andreas Gursky). Like the diurnal photos, Billingham’s directorial nocturamas are bereft of (human) presence. But, in the later photographs, the mode in which duration becomes inscribed in the image becomes more significant than the condition of absence: the endurance necessary for achieving an intelligible picture on film in the dark encodes temporality into the spatial fabric of the photograph. To explain, motion tracked during the time the camera shutter is open is registered on the film as blurring, and this optical indistinctness creates impressionistic, painterly effects. Acquired over the time it takes to transcribe the underlit forms onto film, this phenomenon makes them appear ‘at once static and unsettled’. Twigs, and grasses in overgrown verges, perpetually trembling in the wind, ‘paint the air’ (in Juliana Engberg’s beautiful expression) while the blueblack silhouettes of distant trees, their leafy masses excited by the breeze, ‘seep into the sky’ (Engberg 2007). In the dark the shutter is wide open to receive available light. A medium totally dependent on luminosity, in darkness, paradoxically, the camera detects more optical information than the human eye (in Gardner 2009: 59); but the aperture takes time, leaching every photon of light out of the scene, leaving the resultant imagery looking curiously dry or ‘petrified’ (Engberg 2007) See Untitled (Night) #8 (2003) (Plate 18). According to Engberg, this suspension of time permeates the painterly aesthetic with inexplicable, ‘paranormal’ qualities: permanently unsettled in stillness, Billingham’s nocturamas shiver, ‘as if something has just passed through’ them (2007). It is in this connection that Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘optical unconscious’ – that prognostic dimension of the photographic process

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that makes it mediumistic, as it were, because, in channelling more than can be perceived by unaided human vision, the medium, like a psychoanalytic prosthesis, he writes, ‘reveals the secret’ (1999b: 511). Atget’s proto-surrealistic photographs of the streets of nineteenth-century Paris, which register the barely perceptible imprints of mysteriously moving forms (due to the long-exposure associated with early photographic process), are a case in point: these images look, says Benjamin, like X-rays of a crime scene (1999a: 527). Above all, however, it is the light (and not the lack of it) that has the queerest effects in this work. Sodium street lighting suspends everything in an amber glaze that, under its ionizing cast, reduces all positive forms to lurid shades of green, blue and purple. This inverted chromatography results in those ectoplasmic negative colour-reversals (all aqueous viridian green, indigo, layers of magenta and cobalt), complementary to the opaque orange incandescence that give Billingham’s nocturamas their characteristic oneiric effect. Reminiscent of the psychotropic landscapes of Edward Burra (or Graham Sutherland’s ‘malevolent’ Pembrokeshire dreamscapes [Neve 1990: 74]) the noirish chromatic distortions of the night-time streets of Cradley Heath suggest an altered mode of perception. But this is neither the heightened transparency of sensory-deprived awareness nor the ambiguous lucidity of the surrealist dreamscape. Billingham’s Black Country séances of reversal and inversion, where the subaqueous light struggles to delineate volume and form evoke, rather, the dissociated consciousness of the sleepwalker. Indeed, his nocturamas are not dissimilar to the metaphysical interplay of negativepositive values seen in Ralph Gibson’s Somnambulist (from his 1968 Ghost series). Where absence is denoted, a more subtle presence is intuited. In Untitled [Night] #11 (2003) (Plate 19) for example, a derelict red-brick dwelling, its windows and front door boarded up with plywood, is rearticulated parallel to the picture plane by a scaffold of downpipes and lampposts. Completely recast in the flat veneer of sodium street-light, the masklike façade struggles out of darkness, its surface textures inverted – and burnished – like a mezzotint (Benjamin 1999a: 517). The name plate attached to the wall on the left cropped by the frame states (tautologically) ‘Street’ and the H of the hydrant sign on the lamppost, echoing the rudimentary architecture of the terrace, becomes a hieroglyph signifying house or home (an ironic supplement to the Neighbourhood Watch sign underneath it [cf. Gardner 2009: 56], and the weirdly propositional ‘at any time’ no-parking sign under it). In the graveyard of Untitled [Night] #7 (2003) (Plate 20) a pallid tree extends witchlike limbs over a file of pale sepulchres around which some brittle spindrift autumn leaves have gathered. And in the street of Untitled [Night] #10 (2003) a triangular manhole, like an arrowhead, directs the passing somnambulist into an abyssal, sinister dead end. A tree supernaturally wreathes itself around a telegraph pole in Untitled #9 (2003); and, under the shelter of a makeshift roofed garage of Untitled [Night] #13 (2003), a sad old Peugeot propositions us from the shadows,

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the triangular warning sign above it (complete with stick-figure in frozen sprint) says simply, ‘Danger’. Also, in this photograph, the flat green sky looks like a fake sci-fi screen. On the ground, through a crack in the paving, a spider weed’s feelers creep out, making contact with the real. Here, the mood of alienation appropriate to this tableau, as Christopher Neve writes of John Minton’s landscapes, is neither that of the shepherd nor the isolated goatherd, but rather the ‘loneliness of the night-watchman in his improvised shelter’ (1990: 116). Unlike the earlier diurnal snapshots, as Stella Hockenhull also notes, Billingham’s later directorial nocturamas involve a crucial shift of perspective – an ambivalent presence, suggestive of what she terms an ‘exilic’ position (i.e. the external viewpoint of a former insider) (2014: 172). But the ambivalence in these images (even if it is ‘factually’ correct that the artist had to leave his home town to make them) is more plausibly a function of the eerie which, according to Robert Macfarlane, relates to conditions of ‘unsettlement and displacement’. That is why, in the aesthetic context, the eerie (in a landscape for instance) is articulated ‘more actively by what is missing than what is present’ (2015: 6). The ‘English eerie’, in particular, Macfarlane argues, constitutes a specifically British countercultural response to contemporary social and economic insecurities by unearthing the weird remnants and occult reverberations beneath the Arcadian surfaces of the pastoral tradition. He enumerates distinct aesthetic practices (from art to literature and film to folk and popular music) unified in their commitment to ‘traumatizing’ the mythic ideology of the picturesque landscape. These practices reactivate the eerie in the land, he says, through intimating ‘glimpses and tremors’ of morbid unease underneath the English countryside rather than any explicit representation of terror or contrivance of sublime effect. Eerie culture, he concludes, disturbs precisely because it remains in darkness, refusing to reveal itself (Macfarlane 2015: 4). ‘Awareness of absence’ in Billingham’s Black Country series relates to the eerie in Macfarlane’s sense, in that it is activated by something not visibly present which yet continues to exert efficacious, covertly subversive effects, which Macfarlane claims (with reference to the poetry of Autumn Richardson and the spectral compositions of Richard Skelton) is suggestive of both personal sorrow and ecological portent – ‘in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses’ (Macfarlane 2015). In the Black Country photograph Untitled [Night] #5 (2003) (Plate 21) an area of floodlit wasteland is framed by a wraithlike tree on one side and a roadsign leaning at an angle on the other. Although the semi-symmetrical composition (which exposes the lit-up area between these vertical motifs) suggests a clearing, the figure and ground inversions caused by the artificial lighting conditions create aberrant, paranormal reversals of solid and void, conjuring a realm where the shadows possess more substantiality than the forms that cast them, and offer nothing of the enlightenment traditionally associated with the Romanticist trope of the forest clearing. The inverse light effects in Billingham’s photograph are complicated by

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the intensity of the halogen lamp, making the ground beneath its radioactive flash into permafrost, and petrifying the tree, like the masts of a skeleton ship, into a fragile formation of bone-white branches. More than abandoned, Billingham’s vacant lot seems positively desolate. The sky overhead is dyed magenta by the sodium street lighting and the horizon is obstructed by the low-lying windowless buildings that demarcate the enclosure. A graffito on the concrete fencing in the foreground reads ‘Dean’ in a way that somehow complements the evergreen trees’ menacing silhouettes creeping like stains into the backdrop. Pointing (to the left), the arrow on the red disc of the roadsign, in its (ambiguously anthropomorphic) suggestion of intentionality, carries faint (but unreliable) connotations of the past (what has been abandoned, left behind). But this hieroglyph of directionality, because of its orientation back inside the scene from the top of its crooked pole, directs attention to something that ultimately turns out to be nothing – pointing towards yet another dead end, another, darker, vacancy. In his short study of the eerie, Mark Fisher (2017) discusses the unsolved enigma of the Mary Celeste (the merchant ship discovered adrift and unoccupied in the Atlantic in 1872) as an example ‘saturated in a sense of the eerie’ (Fisher 2017: 62). His hypothesis is that the eerie (unlike ‘the weird’ or indeed the now-familiar Freudian ‘uncanny’) refers to the psychological uncertainty in distinguishing between states of absence and presence. An exemplary instance of the pictorial eerie in this sense – particularly as it relates to Billingham – is Frank Hurley’s photograph The Endurance at Midwinter (aka The Long Long Night) (1915) (Fig. 4.3). Shackleton’s explorers, forced to abandon their TransAntarctic expedition (1914–16) when their vessel became immobilized in the frozen Weddell Sea, embarked into the unknown. Before they left, however, their photographer (enlisted to document the expedition) used twenty magnesium

FIGURE 4.3 Frank Hurley, The Endurance at Midwinter (1915). Getty Images / Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge / Frank Hurley.

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flares to take what turned out to be incredibly evocative pictures of the doomed ship. In the surrounding darkness, the vaporous form, inverted by the extreme conditions, looks ectoplasmic. Although related by Fisher exclusively to the notion of unsolved mystery (what happened and why?) the eerie applies to the phantom image of the Endurance because, in Hurley’s photograph, the eerie is inscribed in the image itself, that is, the ambiguous ontology identified by Fisher (while not a bona fide component of the historical event) is intimated formally in the photograph. Conveying a sense of the (factually unseen) infinite desolation of the surrounding environment, Hurley’s haunting formation functions as an articulate expression of the despair of Shackleton’s crew abandoned in the Antarctic wastes. Billingham’s image of exterior enclosure, more precisely than any of the other Black Country nocturamas, evokes the eerie in Fisher’s sense. As with Hurley’s image of the Antarctic eerie, Untitled (Night) #5 is haunted by a sense of the surrounding environment’s desolation. But the loneliness that pervades this scene, to repeat, is more like the everyday loneliness of the security guard in his shelter. In instances like the abandoned ship – or this floodlit vacant lot – the eerie applies to ambiguity of ontological status, to what Fisher refers to as the ‘failure of presence’. Even in this totally exposed and overlit zone, where nothing is revealed, something (abetted by multiple signifiers of ambiguous presence) is nevertheless vaguely manifest. And it is this paradoxical structure of the absence of presence (darkness made visible) which, as Fisher says, elicits the ‘feeling of the eerie that pertains to ruins or other abandoned structures’ and applies to Billingham’s nocturnal photographs of Cradley Heath (2017: 62). It is as if the camera lens (here augmented by the halogen security light) is searching for a latent presence in the dark. Yet the ambiguous presence sensed in Untitled #5, as suggested, is nothing but an after-effect of actual absence. An indiscernible presence – unseen, sentient, clandestine, slightly malign (perhaps it really is nothing; but, then again, perhaps it is the surfacing of the subterranean coal seam) – is summoned by the eerie.22 A cryptic sensation that, discussed with reference to the ghost stories of M. R. James, is captured in the idiom an ‘eerie calm’ (Fisher 2017: 13). And despite the serene nocturnal quietude of Billingham’s sites of absence, we remain disquieted, nonplussed, convinced, like James’s protagonist in ‘A View from a Hill’ that, regardless of the evidence, it is we who are being observed by an invisible presence hidden in the mezzotint layers of the image.

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Part 2 Landscapes Introduction Appeal to the eerie, Robert Macfarlane insists, ‘doesn’t mean believing in ghosts’ (2015; 2016). Rather, intended strictly as an aesthetic category to help identify certain distinct threads in recent cultural practice, the eerie is opposed to the halcyon myth of the landscape tradition (and the reliance of that tradition on the eighteenth-century aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime). ‘Where the pastoral encodes order and comfort’, Macfarlane suggests, ‘the eerie registers dissent and unease’ (Macfarlane 2016). Citing Paul Nash’s weird photographs of an uprooted oak tree (Monster Field [1938]), Derek Jarman’s super-8 film of chalkland menhirs Journey to Avebury (1971) and Kate Bush’s visionary album The Hounds of Love (1985)23 as salient precursors, Macfarlane identifies (the following selection from an eclectic mix of several other exponents) Ben Wheatley’s disturbing film A Field in England (2013), Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea (2011), Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s multimedia project On Vanishing Land (2013), Jeremy Millar’s sculpture Self-Portrait of a Drowned Man (The Willows) (2011), Melissa Harrison’s neonature-novel At Hawthorn Time (2015), P. J. Harvey’s album White Chalk (2007) and Richard Skelton’s minimalist compositions, which he takes to inaugurate a ‘new landscape aesthetic’ that ‘coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage’ and which, in England, he claims, takes the post-apocalyptic form, not of abrupt catastrophic destruction, but rather of the ‘slow grinding away of species and subtlety’ (2015). Researching the provenance of this dys-pastoral eerie land aesthetic, Macfarlane discovers Christopher Neve’s 1990 study of English place art, Unquiet Landscape. Neve’s chapter on Edward Burra concludes that the painter ‘shows us a distraught countryside, never limited by its usual benign appearance, in the hope that we may be unsettled enough to have some feelings of our own’ (Neve 1990: 123–4). This lyrical yet incisive inquiry into the ‘inarticulate thought’ of painting was initiated by conversations with British artist Ben Nicholson (1894– 1982) (1990: viii) which motivated a penetrating (if largely indirect) critique of the uninspiring ‘Esperanto’ of conventional landscape aesthetics and historiography. Yet even relative to this environment, Billingham’s rural landscape photography can appear disarmingly uncharacteristic. Where the Black Country project, as study of place, retains a certain situational connectivity to the autobiographical context, his photographs of the open countryside seem disconnected from his artistic concerns. What must be recognized here however is that the artist’s long-term (and continuing) interest in landscape is informed by a childhood fascination with wildlife, which, although it may appear asymptotic at first, has unfolded in close parallel with his other work. ‘When I was a teenager’, he says, ‘I went out into the landscape, into nature, lots, sketching it.’ The ‘catalyst’ of this lifelong interest, he

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reveals, was a children’s nature book on British mammals bought with pocketmoney on a school trip (Billingham 2018). Neither a finite project nor a distinct series Billingham’s interrogation of the landscape theme cannot be understood without taking into account this long-term personal and passionate relationship with nature which, through his camera practice, continues to evolve ever more complex and nuanced forms in conjunction with (and independent of) his other interests: ‘Sometimes’, he remarks, ‘I’ll photograph the down-and-outs, the marginalised [on the streets of Swansea] and I’ve gone straight out onto the Gower and done landscapes’ (Billingham 2018). Recall the studies from nature interspersed through Ray’s a Laugh. That’s a succinct way of compartmentalizing his approach to landscape relative to his aggregate work: ubiquitous, intermingled, but ultimately standalone. In fact, the first intimations of the Black Country project appear in sketchbooks as early as 1991 and, not insignificantly, the Cradley Heath nocturamas followed an intensive engagement with the techniques of landscape photography which arguably positions this series closer, in aesthetic terms, to the alt-Romantic questioning of the English pastoral heritage than to the earlier diurnal versions of the same subject (Billingham 2018). A large-scale photobook cataloguing Billingham’s landscape photography from 2001 to 2003 was published by Dewi Lewis in 2008. This publication of fortyeight full-colour plates provides a comprehensive introduction to his ongoing explorations of the (rural) British landscape. Interspersed among pictures of the low hills of the Sussex Weald and the South Downs, the Norfolk Fen and the Suffolk hinterland are photographs taken in Ireland, Pakistan, Greece and Ethiopia. (This discussion however will focus on his photographs of the British landscape.) Inspired by a love of Constable, his photographs of the British countryside attempt to convey the specificity of the island’s landscape formations (and perhaps, without being literal about it, its affinity with the English folk psyche).24 In the spirit of Constable’s cloud studies and outdoor sketches of Dedham Vale or the Stour Valley, Billingham endeavours to capture a ‘transformative moment in the landscape’ (2018; 2015: 4). In a lengthy discussion about the English painter’s cloud sketches, we spoke about the difficulty of capturing metamorphic natural formations as they take on new shapes in clusters and then break apart, and he concluded that the essence of nature is change, something the artist can intuitively respond to only in its (plein air) presence (Billingham 2018). With an instinctive feeling for nature’s changeability, Billingham journeys alone into the countryside in pursuit of elusive climatic phenomena: when, for example, a field of shadow on grassland is suddenly erased by the sun as it clears a shelf of cloud, or when daylight withdraws behind a raincloud, leaving for a split second, a gauzy scattering of prismatic colour in its wake. Commonplace and non-dramatic events. Yet in these mundane phenomena something of the English landscape’s animating spirit (the mythos of the genius terrae britannicae) is complexly and

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intimately conveyed. And it is precisely these ‘inscapes’ that Billingham’s lens searches out, recalling Adorno’s definition of the aesthetic ‘as apparition’ – which ought to be understood in relation to nature, Adorno says, as the ‘paradoxical attempt to transfix this most evanescent instant’ (1997: 84). ‘I don’t really do walks,’ Billingham says. ‘I get immersed in the landscape. If you’re walking’, he insists, ‘you don’t really get it. You have to be still . . . If I counted the steps, it would be very little, but I’m out for over three hours’ (2018).25 I accompanied the artist on one of these excursions in the Gower Peninsula, and observed as he paced and circled back and forth (over puddles and fields, through salt marshes) stopping to look at the horizon through the viewfinder of a cheap wind-on, point-and-shoot camera. The attempt to transfix evanescence in instants of pictorial epiphany requires ‘extreme self-discipline’ (in Craddock 2008). It demands stillness and patience: stillness to osmose the ambient subtleties of the natural environment and patience to learn to become receptive to the transient moments when atmospheric conditions (the shifting shadowplay, for example, of cloudscape over land) forecast the imprecise moments of meteorological transformation he seeks. Hence the recurrent focus, again following Constable, on the sky (2018) and on its damask – ever-changing, shifting, ominous or agitated – cloud-formations. Constable spoke of ‘skying’ in this connection, constantly observing the commingling fluidity of forms in the wide firmament, the ‘“key note” – the standard of “scale”, and the chief “Organ of sentiment”’ over the landscape (in Rosenthal 1987: 122). A recent panoramic photograph Birds (2008) (Fig. 4.4) epitomizes this aesthetic of ‘evanescence at a standstill’. Above an uneven fringe of woodland, a sudden exclamation of crows, like an ink-splash, spatters into the unquiet sky. In a moment, we sense, everything – the fading light, the land, the unsettled air – will have utterly changed. Early spring (end of March, beginning of April) is the artist’s preferred season (2018): when weather conditions are unpredictable and the light is constantly (and rapidly) changing; and when the countryside can suddenly become energized by blustery April showers, and brief moments of evanescence offer themselves to the lens. Several recent photos capture a clearing in the landscape. The dark formations in the peripheries of Untitled (2008), for example, seem to part like curtains to

FIGURE 4.4 Richard Billingham, Birds (Panoramic Landscape) (2008). C-print (45 × 117 cm).

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present the epiphany of nature at the moment of elucidation. The concept of clearing (Lichtung) is a central preoccupation of Heidegger’s late (postphenomenological) inquiries into the question of being (‘fundamental ontology’). The details of Heidegger’s bewildering philosophy need not detain us here, but in a lucid discussion of his writings on art and aesthetics, Iain Thomson (2011) demystifies the philosopher’s theory in a way that intimately relates to this aspect of Billingham’s photography. Lichtung, on a literal level, Thomson says, simply refers to places on forest pathways where the trees have been felled and light floods in. But, he continues, when the clearing is experienced as opening up ‘an unexpected vista, an epiphany [he says] that, although it results only from walking a particular path for oneself, [it] can nevertheless seem to come out of the middle of nowhere’ (2011: 83, my emphasis). Such routine experiences in Heidegger are often given immense significance because they provide intelligible ways of characterizing otherwise abstract (and semi-mystical) notions such as the ‘un-concealment of being in truth’. At first, in the clearing, we encounter, precisely, nothing (it is a place which has been denuded of objects). But then, gradually, we become aware of the light suffusing the area like a spectral form dispersing through the space. And it is the primal encounter with this phenomenon of light made tangible that slowly awakens us to the medium that makes the perception (of objects) possible. The clearing, Thomson concludes, significantly clarifies the core principles of Heidegger’s philosophy, for ‘if we notice the light through which we see, then we can also notice that things show up differently in different lights, and so begin to realise that being exceeds any of its particular manifestations, and indeed makes them all possible’ (2011: 84). To exemplify this abstract concept, Thomson, in a footnote, refers to the artists of the Taos School of New Mexico who believed that aesthetic significance is not contained in the objects of perception (monumental mountain, vista of valley, etc.) but rather is a function of the light that provides visual access to these natural phenomena. ‘In the quick and dramatic shifts of light that characterise the high desert plateau (especially around sunset and sunrise, or when the clouds suddenly roll in during monsoon season)’, Thomson comments, the ‘usually unnoticed light through which we see suddenly becomes radiantly self-evident’ (Thomson 2011: 84). ‘When I take pictures [of the landscape] I’m not really looking at the subject matter,’ Billingham confirms. ‘It’s a feeling for space’ (2018). Yet, even if such statements suggest that, like a Rorschach blot, the environment provides a convenient support for the impression of subjective states, Billingham’s photographs (some of them at least) evidence a more subtle and intuitive response. Despite what the artist claims about Matthew Murray’s landscape photographs, this does not mean that landscape constitutes, for Billingham, in Romantic mode, a receptacle for the projection of psychological states.26 Nor should such comments be construed as a restatement of the sophomoric notion that ‘landscape’ is invariably streamed through subjective experience. Rather, the phenomenological

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(or ecological) approach developed in this chapter (with reference to Billingham’s work) implies a more complex and nuanced constellation of ideas. Neither a scenic resource available ‘out there’ for visual consumption nor a matrix for the incubation of subjective states, landscape always exceeds the effort to frame (and control) it. A radically open and immersive space with the potential to resolve sudden pictorial or dramatic forms of distinct and arresting figuration, the British countryside represents a topological phenomenon which has been moulded by historical and pictorial formations as much as by geological tectonics, and informed deep in its infrastructure by an evolving, ever-changing symbolic heritage (of which the pastoral-picturesque tradition is perhaps only the most obvious expression). Landscape, as is clear from Billingham’s large-scale photographs, is already, prior to representation, a significant achievement of form, space and rhythm, a crucible of atmospheric effects of light and shade that, no matter how veiled or mediated by schematic pretext, enables moments of clearing where the experience of the natural environment can be aesthetically transmitted and the phenomenological imprint of being in the landscape refracted through the lens. This phenomenological exchange takes place, I shall argue, when the photographic image physically orients the viewing subject – that is, positions the viewer bodily (vertically, facing front) – in relation to the horizon.

Symbolism of habitat Billingham’s attitude to the aesthetics of landscape is informed by The Symbolism of Habitat, an obscure inquiry published by geographer (and amateur painter) Jay Appleton in 1990. Appleton defends an ecological approach to landscape influenced by James Gibson’s theory of perception (1979). Purporting to explain the phenomenon of ‘landscape preference’, the study proposes the quite radical view that landscape cannot be completely understood in aesthetic, cultural, ideological or psychological terms but must rather be treated as an evolutionary phenomenon. The characteristic elements of landscape aesthetics originate, Appleton writes, in inherited biological responses to the environment that have evolved from an instinctive process of perceptually decoding the natural world in terms of its value for survival. Distinguishing the concept of landscape from that of the natural environment, Appleton suggests that landscape should be reconceived as the environment visually perceived (1990: 21). Visual perception of the natural environment, in other words, although admittedly overlain with generations of historical, cultural, iconographical and ideological (etc.) layers, is fundamentally a hereditary development rather than an aesthetic feat. Landscape, in Appleton’s ecological hypothesis, represents a species achievement: it is the phenomenon of the perception of the natural environment, internalized through an inherited ‘web’ of symbolic form.

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Codification of the landscape into pictorial motifs derives from genetic ‘mechanisms of survival behaviour’ (1990: 22). Motivated ‘by attraction to seek out and remain within territory’ which optimizes ‘affordances’ for survival, human perceptual behaviour, Appleton proposes, adapts ways to identify potential ‘opportunities’ for habitat within the natural environment (1990: 14). This instinctual form of environmental perception gradually develops into a sophisticated, genetically inherited archetypal ‘web of natural symbolism’ that exists prior to and is more basic than the conventional secondary values which later come to rely upon it for landscape aesthetics (1990: 15, 22). It is this hereditary symbolic web, according to Appleton, that informs more sophisticated perceptual experience of the natural environment as a meaningful ‘optic array’ (Gibson 1979) whereby its elements become legible as semiotic motifs having ‘ulterior significance’ and landscape emerges out of the environment. As opposed to the spontaneous acceptance of a stream of sensory intake, perception, according to James Gibson, should be regarded as an exploratory activity (Rowlands 2003; McDowell 1996). Recent developments in the philosophy of consciousness have finessed the ecological theory of perception into the sensorimotor or ‘enactive approach’ (Noë 2004) which argues that ‘seeing is not something that happens . . . to us or in our brains. It is something we do. It is an activity of exploring the world making use of our practical familiarity with the ways in which our own movement drives and modulates our sensory encounter with the world’ (Noë 2009: 60).27 A simplistic (but adequate) way of understanding this shift in emphasis is to allow ourselves to rethink perceptual experience as a sensorimotor modality that enables cognitive and meaningful physiological interaction with the environment. Appleton’s related hypothesis is that the natural symbolic order that visual perception engages to activate intelligence about the surrounding environment is a form of enactive engagement that remains sublimated in vestigial form in the sophisticated pictographic elements of landscape aesthetics. As ‘environmental perception’ articulates the visual field into relatively valued regions of potential enaction, Appleton claims, so the compositional zones of pictorial space are encoded with certain distinct semantic values that derive ultimately from this cognitive ability to act in the world (Rowlands 2010: 74). Appleton’s habitat theory, for Billingham, implies a phenomenological account of perception founded on direct experiential interaction with the environment. It becomes possible, according to this ecological theory, the artist suggests, to see how the basic spatial aspects of pictorial configuration can be articulated to orient the subject, bodily, in proprioceptive space, to determine, for example, certain expectations from the seen (space) to the unseen (time) (2018). Understanding Appleton’s concept of ‘environmental perception’ through this phenomenological (enactive) theory, Billingham observes, the elements of landscape can be encoded to influence both a cognitive and an existential engagement with perceptual space (2018). A path, for example, is not just an arbitrary scenic motif.

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Having a significant symbolic function that exceeds decorative pattern, the path, from a cognitive perspective, by creating a spatial tension between verticality and horizontality, represents a perceptual index of negotiation from the exterior to the interior of fictive space. The path, in other words, not only directs perception into the landscape but also activates an interesting optical tension between the flatness of the photographic surface and its pictorial recession into depth which renders the picture plane transparent and facilitates a ‘participatory’ cognitive engagement with the image space (Berleant 1991: 68). Paths, or rhythmically compelling suggestions of pathways that perceptually engage the viewer to interact with the image space, appear in several of Billingham’s landscapes. The track at the left of Ethiopian Landscape (2002a) navigates a pathway for perception into the interior, between the trees, towards the horizon. Similarly, the dramatic linear perspective of the primitive roadway in (another) Ethiopian Landscape (2002b) conveys us immediately, and without impediment, towards the distant, arid horizon framed by the photo. Narrow, steep creases in the hillside of Mountains (2001) sneak down through the unkempt terrain, slowing engagement with the space, to terminate in the precipitous bowl-like clearing of the valley below; and the path in Fence (2001) cuts straight through the scene from left to right, intimating an interior movement parallel to, and ultimately out of, the frame. Alternatively, in South Downs (2003), the curvilinear path winds round like a chicane, protracting perceptual access to the space, allowing the scene to be negotiated only in a tortuous, corkscrew pattern (the serpentine waterways in Cliffs [2001] have a similar decelerating perceptual effect). Another, more complex, perceptual interaction with pictorial space occurs in Muddy Path (2001) (Fig. 4.5) where imaginative optical access to the top of the hill is impeded by the amorphous pock-marked, trenched excremental pulp in the foreground. And,

FIGURE 4.5 Richard Billingham, Muddy Path (2001). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

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finally, following the sinuous pattern of sunken footprints in the sand of the Beach in Karachi (2001) we find ourselves cognitively meandering deep into the scene till we reach the tiny silhouettes clustering around the apartment block on the distant horizon. To verify his ecological hypothesis, Appleton developed a lexicon of analytic principles that correlate with specific perceptual responses to the environment and according to which it becomes (codified as) landscape: prospect, refuge and hazard (1990: 25–6). ‘In our symbolic terminology’, Appleton suggests, ‘prospect, refuge and hazard are first and foremost strategic concepts to do with immediate behavioural responses to environmental challenges’ (1990: 46). Prospect, firstly, refers to our orientation within the environment. Access to landscape is not merely a matter of the transparency of the pictorial field or of the boundaries of peripheral vision. Cognitive access to the space is afforded into depth by the unbounded horizon that recedes into the visual distance at a scale potentially infinite in extension. Prospect relates principally to the horizon. Where and how the horizon appears in the optic field has a crucial effect on the symbolic zoning of the environment and a profound impact on behavioural responses to landscape. Transcending in depth the real spatial limitations of the other dimensions of the visual, the horizon is particularly rich in ocular symbolic association: manifested at the focal limit of the perceptual array, and signifying the zone where skyline seems to touch the distant land (and pass beyond it into the unseen and unknown), the horizon, for Appleton, symbolizes opportunity. Endless extension anticipates something that exceeds its limits. As every event of perception, according to phenomenologists, occurs within a factually invisible (not-yet perceived) context of anticipation (Husserl 1964; Merleau-Ponty 1962; 2004; Moran 2000: 161–3), the horizon therefore, as a focal limit, is a key existential criterion: for it constitutes a limit that is cognitively surpassed in the projective, future-directed imagination. Invoking something beyond the frontiers of the visible, and intimating the unseen and the unknown, the horizon ultimately comes to represent temporality (i.e. the not-yet or the future) and, to that extent, stimulates cognitive curiosity and positive explorative behaviour (1990: 34). According to Appleton, the ‘concepts of context, scale and particularly prediction’ are correlated with the horizon and incorporate the ‘relationship between past experience, present perception and future expectation’. To this extent, he maintains, horizontal prospect expresses ‘that geographical orientation which is of such importance in survival behaviour and is central to all exploratory activity’ (1990: 38). We respond instinctively, reflexively and positively to the horizon because, in orienting us proprioceptively to the landscape, it recapitulates the evolved achievement of verticality (the continuous subpersonal sensation of mastering gravity). Refuge, secondly, refers to the instinct for protection. This relates most closely to the general theme of habitat. Aspects of the open environment are assigned emotional values based on their appropriateness for

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dwelling within an ecosystem conducive to survival. Motivated by pursuit of safety, the visual field is scanned for opportunities for concealment and shelter; perceptual zones that appear to offer sanctuary are therefore highly valued in the symbolism of habitat. Distinct elements within the environment (or space) that possess the potential to provide rest, security and camouflage, Appleton says, become relevant from this perspective. So, any salient semi-vertical object within the scope of the optical field that controls attention by interrupting perceptual access to the horizon is read as a point of interest – for stopping, resting, seeking safety, shelter or concealment – in the landscape. A vertical form, for instance, interposed between the foreground and the horizon (a wood, a copse of trees, a building or ruin, even a distant hill or mountain) is assessed relative to the functional symbol of refuge as to its value for affording shelter or protection and rapidly identified as a potential place of sanctuary. Hazard, thirdly, refers to the perception of threat. Activating the instinct of self-preservation, if certain elements in the environment, by their expressive forms, are perceived as ominous, they are negatively coded, assigned, that is, averse emotional values. In this sense, hazard can be regarded as the antithesis of refuge. The distinctive behavioural response to emblems of hazard, not unsurprisingly, is evasion. And, from a cognitive behavioural viewpoint, when the environment is sensed as unsafe or dangerous, a flight stimulus is triggered: the instinctual urge simply to break away and seek sanctuary elsewhere. Arguably, a fundamental implication of this theory is that the instinctual response to the environment underlying its ecological narrative is presumed to evolve from an adaptation selected for survival because of the importance of being alert to potential trauma. Sensitivity to hazard is crucial for survival, and Appleton’s argument is that this sensitivity to potential trauma remains sublimated in vestigial (if psychologically still very powerful) form in the environmental perception of landscape. Psychological aversion to anything in the immediate environment perceived as menacing, when applied to the aesthetics of landscape, may be subtly invoked by anything obscure that obstructs or complicates undisrupted access to the prospect of the horizon. In this way, certain compositional motifs in a landscape may become potential motifs expressive of hazard. Something that perturbs the opticality of the horizon prompts negative emotional associations. An obscure or indistinct form in the middle ground, for instance, may elicit uneasiness, a building with a row of tiny windows may appear sinister, a twisted arboreal form in the foreground may exude vague menace or an eccentrically shaped hill may appear foreboding. Clearly, ambiguities of interpretation, at this psychological level, are conceivable. ‘Many environmental objects’, Appleton acknowledges, ‘communicate conflicting signals’ (1990: 25). We may come to doubt, for instance, that an obscure object in the optical field (which might appear a symbol of refuge) is in fact entirely safe. We might suspect that it’s already occupied or being used as camouflage to conceal an indirect

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threat. Incidentally, this kind of ambiguity of interpretation provides a plausible explanation of the eerie as it applies to Billingham’s Black Country series. Where an object of refuge makes us uneasy because, in the absence of the human figure, we can’t ignore the feeling that it harbours an imperceptible hazard (someone watching from the poky windows of a building, some trick-of-the-light shade or half-glimpsed animal presence hidden in the trees) the eerie (à la M. R. James) is conjured. In Telegraph Poles (2001) for example, access to the prospect of the horizon is inhibited by strange (slightly anthropoid) forms in the landscape. Over the hill, a further robotic structure is partially visible and, because it looks as if it’s advancing towards us, elicits averse emotional responses. Similarly, the linked wire in Fence (2001), another adverse structure, blocks direct (physical) access to the scene while enabling perceptual access through its cross-hatching to the prospect beyond; its symbolism undermines refuge however by denying entry to the space rather than protecting us from any perceived threat. The still water of the moat in the foreground of River (2001) similarly compromises direct access to the prospect seen on its further bank (with its multiple and affluent symbols of refuge). Reflecting the sky in its calm surface, the water contains a confusing illusion that exacerbates its function as a zone of exclusion. The viewer, as a result, feels alienated from the vista of prosperity on the other side (this is reinforced by the neat, but robust, fencing that surrounds the homestead). Thus, point of view is slightly criminalized by the spatial articulation of this image. Hedge (2001) is an example of what Appleton calls ‘deflected vista’: namely, where expectation is unfulfilled by a pathway with an obscured destination. Such compositions evoke curiosity while simultaneously inhibiting it (1990: 60); the mysteriousness of the pathway into darkness motivates exploratory responses but, at the same time, stimulates anxiety concerning the possibility of deception or potential harm (1990: 67). The challenges of the flat landscape have resulted in some of the most effective, dramatic (as well as eerie) images of Billingham’s career (Craddock 2008). His photographs of the East Anglian countryside, in particular, induce us to consider a perfectly empty nothingness, as if awaiting some ‘numinous presence’ to enter the frame (Hockenhull 2014: 61, 77, 83). In his studies of the Norfolk fens, for example, the sky touches the land in a shimmering band of light that disappears beyond the visible horizon and discloses a space so expansive it seems to exceed the limits of the perceivable. The reclaimed coastal floodplains of the Norfolk fens have a distinctive, otherworldly geography. Almost supernaturally flat, the reclaimed land is canalized by a grid of drainage channels and interspersed with windmills, ancient hydraulic works and water pumps. It is perhaps no surprise that the region possesses a rich tradition of folklore and myth (and has provided the setting for many of M. R. James’s creepiest ghost stories) (Drew 2016). In Billingham’s photograph Dyke

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(2003) (Plate 22), the preternatural flatness of the Norfolk fenland is fractured by a deep crevice that divides the scene and widens dramatically from the prospect of the horizon into the immediate foreground, making it look like it’s still opening. This is one of the many canals built to drain the wetlands of the East Anglian peninsula. Yet here it acts pictorially to enhance the perspectival distances explored in the photograph. Flawlessly mirroring the sky, the water’s surface is indiscernible, an illusion dispelled only by the slight rippling effects at its extreme right bank. The entire composition, in fact, is a complex interplay of precarious reflections, of strange spectral reversals of density and liquidity, solid and void. Indeed, the dyke’s austere linearity, limned by scratched and broken scribbles of marshland reeds at its edges, reinforces the horizontality of the flatfield which, in turn, dramatically intersects the verticality of the photographic surface. Finally, the rickety windmill made microscopic (and implausibly anthropomorphic) by the vast space, functions as a distant symbol of potential refuge. Yet, although it leads ineluctably to the horizon, the dyke also threatens to widen further and swamp the viewer and, because of this, functions as a latent symbol of hazard.28 Where the focus of attention plays on the horizon, the landscape is suffused with an ‘eerie calm’. In Pond (2002) and Cloud Break (2001) (Plate 23), for instance, the low horizon again dominates. The look to the west in the latter reveals a sky bloated with raincloud, livid and oppressively close. Yet the clouds are spreading to reveal pearlescent veils of trapped light among their folds. In this image, space is redistributed in successive parallel veils that function pictorially as intermediate horizontal zones (Appleton 1990: 32): bands of hedgerow, breaking up on the left, give way to the lattice of enclosed fields beyond, providing sequential access to the scene. The shadow cast over the landscape is broken by two distant elliptical foci of pale sunlight which activate our perception deep in the environment, inexorably settling on the horizon (and progressing, imaginatively, beyond it). In another image of the Norfolk series, Gates29 (2002/3) (Plate 24), the horizon is again emphatic, appearing to extend into infinite distance and generating an eerie stillness. Under a leaden sky, the relentlessly flat land is now in shadow. However, a strange phenomenon of clearing is captured in this photograph: just under the horizon, parallel to the picture plane, a phosphorescent stripe of paleyellow passes right through the land (a cornfield?).30 Apropos the connotations of environmental perception discussed above, the horizon in this image is literally highlighted as a symbolic zone of exploratory anticipation. Yet, typically (and here Billingham again reveals his study of Constable),31 it’s also explicable as a purely atmospheric phenomenon: an evanescent effect of light and shade preserved in the aperture of its happening. Focal attention on the horizon gives the intervening space a perspectival lucidity that produces an immediate instinctual response to the openness of the landscape. With Billingham’s most resonant landscapes, we discover we’re already perceptually immersed in the environment before becoming completely aware of engaging with its salient symbolic motifs. In this photograph,

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for instance, the titular shattered gates in the middle distance, paradoxically, need to be penetrated in order to enter the inner space of the scene. This enigmatic motif, referencing Constable’s ubiquitous Cornfield (1826), suggests a pictorial pathway that, just as a gateway in a field would, gives cognitive access to the interior (it’s impossible not to imagine walking through those gates). An entranceway that entices us to advance through it, apparently presenting no obstacle, the gates define an obscure, indeterminate perimeter and, consistent with Appleton’s ‘deflected vista’ symbol, deter direct entrance to the scene. Although the portal is wide open, signifying – inviting – further exploration of the landscape, in this context, the strange motif somehow accentuates the eerie emptiness of the field, making us inexplicably uneasy. No hedges, wall or perimeter fence demarcate the area that the gates were originally used to access. The functionless remains of an obsolete enclosure, this once powerful gateway (note the contrast with the thin tubular steel form beside it), now almost absorbed back into the natural kinship of the fenland, provides actual access to nothing (to empty space), and could, in fact, easily be circumvented. Deeper into the scene, improbably, the eerie motif is alliterated, where, mysteriously, a further set of functionless stiles appear (traversed at a later stage in the perceptual progress towards the horizon).32 Such compositional strategy has a perceptual effect Arnold Berleant (1991) has characterized as participatory ‘engagement’ according to which the landscape gradually envelops the ‘viewer’ in its experiential image-field. Ultimately, confirming Appleton’s ecological approach, this form of relational ‘engagement’ involves a recapitulation of the artist’s phenomenological response to the landscape.33 Yet this reciprocal effect exceeds any achievement of spatial manipulation; it isn’t a device to augment ‘visual interest and variety’ or to ‘lead the eye’ into the pictorial space. Rather what is accomplished here, Berleant argues, is an instinctual ‘occasion for the perceptual movement of the living body into the landscape’ (1991: 68). Participatory perception is distinguished by a ‘more intimate’, experientially involving relation with pictorial space than ocular perspective, whereby the scene opens up to ‘embrace the viewer’ (1991: 66). Going so far as to suggest that through participatory engagement we become proprioceptively embedded in the immersive landscape, Berleant characterizes his ‘enactive’ theory of relational engagement as generating ‘a space not external to an observer or opposed but reaching out to encompass the viewer as a participant’ (1991: 74). Referring to Constable’s The White Horse (1818–19) (Fig. 4.6) as a key example of such engagement, Berleant observes that this vast canvas is too physically expansive to be apprehended in a single viewpoint. Exceeding a restricted optical perspective, Constable’s landscape appears to resist comprehension by visual perception. When the monumental piece is approached however, a strange phenomenon occurs: closer to the surface, we find ourselves absorbed into the immersive composition, ‘we walk along the river bank in the foreground and become a part of the rustic activity

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FIGURE 4.6 John Constable, The White Horse (formerly A Scene on the River Stour) (1818–19). The Frick Collection, New York (131.4 × 188.3 cm). Getty Images / Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images.

before us’ (1991: 70). Accessing the space of the painting, Berleant concludes, is gradual, the essence of the landscape disclosed in time only to participatory perception which ‘requires that we look not at the painting as an integral object but into the painting, into its space’ (1991: 69). Looking west, to the left of the scene in Billingham’s Gates, some naked sky is visible. But the intimidating cloud cover seems too heavy for the weak azure to completely break through. Such phenomena of climatic intentionality – a clearing, for example, struggling to assert itself in the corner of the sky – witnessed in several photographs of this period imbue his evanescent landscapes with a pervasive, uneasy tension. The aquatint skies over the peatland flats of Irish Landscape (2002), for instance, seem pregnant with latent ‘expectancy’ (Craddock 2008); Storm at Sea (2001) conjures an apparition toiling to form over the fretted surface of the ocean. A sense of imminence, of something suspended on the brink of happening, is suggested by the way the heavy clouds infringe the dying light above the field in Norfolk Landscape (2002) (Plate 25); even the fractious limestone formations in The Burren (2001) seem troubled by a subterranean energy that harries the suspenseful oceanic calm of the Atlantic seascape beyond. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this suspended atmospheric tension is the extraordinary photograph Cows in the Rain (2003) (Plate 26) which, even more dramatically than Gates, brightens at the left of the scene as the dark and dreadful cloudcover disperses to admit a liquid, sunlit efflorescence towards which a herd of grazing cattle lumbers. The shower falling in diagonal streaks across the bleak field has a shuttering effect, creating a semi-transparent weave through which the animals move. A study of directionality, of internal rhythms, as much as a document (of place) this self-consciously painterly photograph, where the spattering rain ‘paints’ the surface, anticipates Billingham’s more

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recent alt-Romantic atmospheric landscapes (see for example the 2018 Wakelin Award photograph) (Billingham 2018).34 By virtue of the internal rhythms (the directionality of the animals and the angle of the falling rain), the viewer is perceptually ‘steered’ towards the clearing at the edge, ultimately out of the frame, in a right-to-left route, a direction that, paradoxically (in conflict with the horizon), carries temporal connotations of the past. And the horizon is, in fact, broken up in this photo by the veil of rain which transforms the light of the clearing into a glittering, tangible form. Introducing the 2015 exhibition of panoramic photographs at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, Emma Morris acknowledged the complex ways in which Billingham’s photography inflects ‘the pictorial rhetoric’ of the British pastoral tradition ‘from Constable to Hockney’ (Morris 2015: 2). Arguably, this is nowhere more evident than Cows in the Rain. But it is neither Constable nor Hockney that provides the frame of reference in this instance. Rather Billingham’s image of indeterminate shapes dissolving into a mirage of light invokes Turner’s Northumberland study Norham Castle, Sunrise (1835–40) (Plate 27). Although officially unfinished, this late oil sketch is remarkable for the way its radical renegotiation of the key conventions of the English picturesque anticipates high impressionism. Attending exclusively to the phenomenal effects of luminosity, Turner has reduced pictorial incident to the bare minimum, leaving only the pale spectral suggestion of forms sketched in deliquescent blues and umber glazes over opaque yellow and off-white impasto. No clear distinction remains between sky and land. And amid all these hallucinatory forms liquefying into their own reflections, only a single distinct entity emerges: the Jersey cow in the foreground. As with Turner, the focus of aesthetic interest in Cows in the Rain is transferred to the medium of the visible itself, the light, towards which the insubstantial forms are moving, like apparitions, through the drizzle.

Conclusion: Alt-Romanticism and the unquiet landscape Attempts have been made, perhaps inevitably, to link Billingham’s landscape aesthetic to the Romantic tradition, under the labels of neo-Romanticism (Hockenhull 2014) and Damaged Romanticism (Sultan in Gardner et al. 2009). Although notoriously imprecise, Romanticism is broadly the view that experience of nature is permeated by subjectivity and that psychological states are manifest in the landscape. Noting the renascence of perennial Romanticist configurations in recent cultural discourse, Hockenhull remarks the ‘large number’ of contemporary artists looking for new modes of ‘expression through the deployment of Romantic motifs’, a tendency confirmed in three international exhibitions, Romantic

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Detachment (New York, 2004), Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art (Frankfurt, 2005) and Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion (Houston TX, 2008) (2014: 22). In the incarnations of neo-Romanticism, the salient motifs of Romanticism reappear in darkened mode and radically eclectic contexts and, when ‘deployed’, it is often with a knowing irony or criticality. In this altered cultural space, indeed, these neo-Romanticist tendencies are explicated in terms of response to the ‘challenges of contemporary society’. Issues of isolation or existential alienation, for instance, renegotiated through millenarian anxieties about ecological destruction or the threat of environmental catastrophe, are explored with reference to the relationship ‘between nature and the human condition’ that draws on, but also subtly subverts, the Arcadian vision of classical ‘escapist’ Romanticism (Hockenhull 2014: 22). Neo-Romanticism assumes hybrid forms of dark whimsical, grotesque or violent beauty, and Hockenhull cites artists in particular who reject ‘modernity’ in favour of the strange, hallucinatory and phantasmagorical, creating ‘invented landscapes’ that mediate contemporary emotional complexes ‘while still drawing on [the] traditional iconography [of Romanticism]’ (2014: 23). Photographs from the Black Country series were included in Damaged Romanticism, with curators Sultan and Gardner (in Gardner 2009) citing the ‘haunting’ melancholy of Billingham’s work as a key reference for the ‘aftermath aesthetic’ associated with this exhibition’s reimagining of Romanticism. Sultan specifically emphasizes the ‘eerily open and expansive’ nature of Billingham’s landscapes, which, despite the focus on absence, are nevertheless ‘peppered with humanizing traces’ (2008: 14). This neo-Romanticist thread, although it may involve a subversion of the ‘eye-candy’ picturesque – and even though inspired by emotional insecurity and psychological anxieties – is also, Sultan insists, informed by an optimistic ‘survivor sensibility’ (a sense that the ‘future can be better than the past’). Billingham’s work, even if melancholy and eerie, Sultan acknowledges, manifests a hopeful horizon of ‘transformation and confidence’. As well as ‘cataclysm’, his photographs suggest an encouraging ‘opportunity’ for ‘cathartic potential’, and even if they remain grounded in a ‘profound realism’, there are nevertheless ‘glimpses of reconciliation’, resolution, even redemption, in his landscapes (2008: 9, 15, 11). According to Christopher Neve, however, in critical discussions of landscape, Romanticism often functions as a default paradigm. And, by extension, hybrid forms of neo-Romanticism (the ‘essence’ of which he defines idiosyncratically as the ‘benign landscape corrupted by the present and by bitter feeling’ [1990: 113]) should, like all discursive classificatory paradigms, be regarded with some scepticism. ‘Always suspect -isms’, Neve advises. Especially concepts such as neoRomanticism, because these schemas, he argues, have a tendency to ‘over-heat’. The sentiment ‘it tries to express [can] be foisted on to landscape’, he claims, ‘like gratuitous temper or hypermania’ (1990: 118). His concern here evidently relates

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to the pathetic fallacy – Ruskin’s celebrated critique of the naïve tendency to read natural phenomena as expressions of psychological states (1990: 116). Inflated sentiments such as Sultan’s rhapsodic statement that the aesthetic of Romanticism (albeit ‘damaged’) testifies to ‘the silence of irrecoverable loss, the sadness of mourning, the incomprehensibility of extreme trauma, and the psychological complexity born of an awareness of fate’s capricious finality’ seem like textbook instances of Neve’s ‘over-heated’ discourse in practice (Sultan in Gardner 2009: 9). Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Billingham’s landscape photography is informed by a complex of responses to the legacy of the English pastoral tradition (and is especially responsive to the arch-Romantics Constable and Turner); yet there remains a question as to the appropriateness of situating his practice apropos this neo-Romanticist mythos (2018). In fact, Neve’s own alternative experiential examination of British landscape (as aesthetic of place) arguably provides a more plausible context for situating Billingham’s landscape photography (2018). First, it fits with the artist’s insistence that specific connection with location is crucial to his practice, adding that he wishes to be regarded as an ‘artist of place’ (2018) in the lineage of Constable and the English painters discussed by Neve (i.e. Nash, Ravilious, Spenser and Lowry [the artist also includes Hockney’s Yorkshire]) rather than a landscape artist per se (2018). For Billingham, like Edward Burra (one of the painters extensively analysed by Neve), seeks out places with a singular and identifiable topography, places haunted by an atmospheric (and ancient) prehistory of (sometimes distinctly weird) symbolic association (the Stour Valley, Beachy Head, the South Downs, the Norfolk fen, the Welsh borders, the New Forest, the Gower Peninsula, etc.). Secondly, although his bleak, expressionless reimagining of Albion aspires to a (distinctly anti-Romantic) condition of complete emotional neutrality, it is nevertheless unquiet in Neve’s sense, still, but imperceptibly agitated by a restrained, subterranean tension that evokes ‘hermetic and esoteric histories lying latently in the landscape’ (Young 2011: 24). Something, some chthonic presence, beyond the scope of image-representation technology is suggested. Indeed, in a typically disquieting image, Neve refers to the ‘sprung bones underneath’ John Nash’s inscape, and, indicating the sense of imminence and slight apprehension in Burra’s work, remarks that he makes the countryside look as if ‘something terrible were about to happen’ (1990: 123). Billingham’s images of the British countryside, like the Black Country series, are photographs of nothing, images of space, of emptiness, sites of absence. They are haunted by the spectre of nothingness made manifest; as his lens slowly surveys a flatfield in England, it becomes a medium for ‘the region’s revenant powers’ (Keenan 2016: 44). Eerie, as defined by Fisher, is an effect of paradox: where we expect something – nothing. Yet, in these eerie images of the British countryside, unlike the townscapes, something even stranger occurs. As we look at them, the nothingness is exorcized by the activity of perception: enacting perception,

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negating the nothingness, we observe the landscape become its own perceptual event suspended in the opticality of the photographic surface (Shiff 2008: 60). This may be because of the awareness that these photographic images ineluctably involve the artist’s being there in the landscape; this tacit knowledge gives these photographs a singular existential structure. ‘I get immersed in the landscape,’ Billingham admits: ‘You have to let the landscape absorb you’ (2018). His complete ‘sensory immersion’ (Shiff 2008: 102) in the landscape is somehow phenomenologically transferred to the image. The photographer is really there in the environment, and although this immersion is inevitably mediated through the image, his immediate response is sensed in the spectral presence haunting the ‘penumbra’ of the image.35 Are we immersed in the space where the artist was? Do we perceive what he perceived, experience what he experienced? No. We are just viewers made conscious, through the clarity of the photographic surface, of the sensation of perception: looking at Billingham’s landscapes we experience what Joyce so brilliantly characterized as the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’ take shape before our eyes (Joyce 1922: 45). Samuel Todes’s Body and World examines the ontological implications of the ‘asymmetrical’ structure of the body.36 The distinction between the body’s front and back, he argues, conditions all ‘sense of what is “behind” or “ahead” of us in an already organised spatiotemporal field’ (Hoffman in Todes 2001: xliv). All experience and perceptual activity, Todes proposes, is motivated towards ‘what lies ahead’ (Todes 2001: 118). Because we negotiate space more efficiently in a frontal direction, this gives the active body a ‘horizontal field’ of perception conditioned by the intuitive sense of our orientation in space. Most significantly, it provides expectation of what’s presented beyond the limits of this ‘perceptual horizon’. For Todes’s front-back asymmetry, according to Hubert Dreyfus, additionally ‘makes the horizontal field temporal’: ‘[W]hat has yet to be faced is experienced as in the future, what is being faced and dealt with makes up the pragmatic present, and what already has been faced and is behind us is experienced both spatially and temporally passed’ (Dreyfus 2003: 83–84). Are we not oriented by Billingham’s image to face the horizontal field that the artist faced when, one day, he went into the landscape to take his shot? Indeed, is our entire attitude to the resultant image not crucially determined by this phenomenological orientation? The futurity symbolized by the horizon, in other words, was the future anticipated by the artist. It is his past future that we now face when confronting the image. At our back, on the other hand, is the past that he’s put behind him. And the perceptual moment consigned by the photograph to perpetuity is the diaphanous form of an evanescent instant, past yet unabandoned, suspended in the moment of its happening. The future-past exchange that the image enables is relationally experienced by the viewer in the pictorial exteriorinterior interface (the horizon in the picture is in front of where we stand in vertical antithesis of its horizontality). Yet, it is as a result of this temporal paradox

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that continuously splits the present into past and future, that the artist’s (literally) absent but still ‘active presence’ is inscribed in the spatio-temporal sketch of the photograph, and, enacted in perpetuity with it, his immediate behavioural response to the environment. This unleashes our sense of Being-There (Dasein) (Heidegger’s term for human existence) enacted by the image (Shiff 2008: 48). That strong impulse to escape intuited in his photographs of the countryside is nothing but the trace of the artist’s past presence inscribed in the pictorial space of the landscape (a penumbral felt absence left by his instinctual response to the freedom promised by the horizon). An existential sketch of spatio-temporal experience, a crystallization of time – the future in front, the past behind – Billingham’s panoramic photographs of the British countryside, as much as their clarity and transparency of surface emphasize openness and promise freedom, simultaneously express ‘a claustrophobic tension and anxiety’, an eerie sensation, perpetually, that ‘something is about to happen’.37

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5

ENCLOSURE ZOO (2004–7)

Why look . . . Following publication of the Black Country photobook in 2004 Billingham’s Cradley Heath townscapes were curated for a cycle of European shows. Launched at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 2005, the exhibition travelled to Madrid (La Fabrica) and Bologna (Galleria Marabini), before opening at the Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF) that summer. A comprehensive entry on his work appeared that year in the Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century Photography (Warren 2005). Meanwhile, the artist had just returned from Italy where he was completing a contemporary arts residency award (then known as the Sargent fellowship) in the British School at Rome. Secured in 2002 with the intention of developing a long-term plan to photograph the animal in captivity, during the Sargent fellowship, the artist was spending time studying the animals in Rome Zoo. The sabbatical coincided with a technical determination to explore new photographic processes (i.e. the techniques of long exposure later finessed in the Cradley Heath nocturamas). With its given structure of enclosures, cages, compounds and pens, the zoo afforded an environment conducive to large-format camera and tripod set pieces. Already framed in a system of exhibition and taxonomic display, in their spatial constructs, the animals offered optimal object lessons for Billingham’s ongoing interrogation of photographic space. Dissatisfied with the emergent images however the project was dropped. When he returned to the UK, Billingham was invited to revisit the abandoned proposal by Birmingham Arts organization VIVID; and, late in 2003, he was commissioned to complete the project under the auspices of their new interdisciplinary media research initiative. Reconceived as a practice-led research

project, its objective was renegotiated and given renewed impetus. So, accepting a residency at VIVID in 2004, Billingham returned to the problem of the zoo. Recognizing his ‘reflexive’ and ‘almost scientific observational sense’, under the explicit re-designation of the proposed body of work as a research project, VIVID provided resources for Billingham to develop his pictorial inquiry without a prescribed outcome. This reorientation suited the artist’s intuitive methodological instincts – that ‘feral hunger for the un-regarded moment’ so perceptively recognized by Searle as the essence of his practice (Searle 2000) – the empirical mode of inquiry seemed the perfect fit for Billingham’s investigative sensibility. A short text by John Berger published in three instalments in New Society in 1977 (later republished in About Looking [2009a]) provided the point of departure. Billingham discovered Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’ while an undergraduate at Sunderland and remembers the text as confirming his interest in the theme of the captive animal. Yet he couldn’t find a way of assimilating that interest with his aesthetic preoccupations at the time. Now, however, having completed the family project, it was, paradoxically, by way of Berger’s great nemesis Francis Bacon, that Billingham found a way to address the question of the zoo. Tim Adams recognized the influence of Bacon on Billingham’s approach, particularly regarding how the entity of the animal is posited as a dynamic physical form within the rigorous structural framework of the enclosure (Adams 2007).1 But it was the title, oddly, more than the actual content of Berger’s essay that motivated Billingham’s research activity.

. . . at animals? Reformulated as a research question, the title of Berger’s inquiry becomes rich and subtly suggestive, prompting examination on several levels. On a cultural (or anthropological) level, for instance, it enquires of humanity to address the reasons why (wild) animals are captured for exhibition and display. Addressing what kind of power relations are implied by the asymmetrical zoological gaze, on another level, the question functions as a more personal interrogation, challenging us to defend our morbid fascination with observing the world-disenfranchised (live) animal (in a cage). Yet it may be considered, thirdly, in a more rhetorical way: namely, ‘What is the point of the zoo?’ Put this way, indeed, the question can be formulated simply to engender doubt. Under what (social, cultural, ethical) circumstances is the abjection of the non-human animal to the (anthropic) gaze legitimate? Why look at animals? Of course, we look (at them), but do captive animals look (at us)? Can zoo animals return the (anthropic) gaze? Are such animals conscious of, aware of, the look of the spectator? Are they capable of acknowledging that look (and all the moral implications that follow from it)? Interrogating implicit questions such as these, the artist pretty soon recognized that his practice had the potential to

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motivate an implicit but neutral critique, and, restructured in this way, that artistic inquiry can contribute to addressing what conservationist Jane Goodall has called the ‘problem of the zoo’ (in Noelker 2004). Formulated as a hypothesis, precisely in its equivocality, Berger’s question freed the artist to examine the ‘problem of the zoo’ from unaccustomed angles, which proved more productive for Billingham’s (Sickertian) style of photographic realism. Motivating the inquiry through the engine of the research question, indeed, suggested an original way of investigating the theme of the zoo from an aesthetic perspective, enabling Billingham to avoid some typical procedural limitations of thematic approaches to this topic while retaining a distinct level of criticality; this meant he could remain ethically neutral – and non-didactic – while maintaining a fidelity to his characteristic forensic methodology. When addressing the question of the zoo animal, the tendency to sentimentalize (or sensationalize, anthropomorphize, aestheticize, render photogenic or exotic, etc.) seems an involuntary, deeply unconscious, almost instinctual (almost, we could say, human) impulse; yet it is also, of course, an ultimately useless impulse for research because it simply reproduces the original problem at another level. Although Billingham’s lens is directed towards the dilemma of animal confinement (hence the focus on the creature’s behaviour as circumscribed by the spatial confines of the enclosure) the main objective of this project is empirical, forensic and observational. Interrogating the enigma of why (wild) animals are incarcerated and put on display for (human) visual consumption and how the (live) animals’ subsequent suffering is expressed through morbid behaviour remain (as we will consider) motivating concerns of Billingham’s project. Yet, this project is neither a study of animal behaviour nor a moral critique of the suffering of zoo animals. Rather, these issues are subsidiary concerns of Billingham’s research focus. They may be explored, that is, in an morally neutral way, indirectly through the artist’s attention on the ‘scopic’ regime of the zoological frame. This relates to the question of how, under the human gaze, the zoo animal performs a concept of the bestial that the animal subsequently comes to symbolize. Throughout the large-format, high-definition photographs, film stills, video studies and snapshots that comprise Billingham’s zoo research, his focus is overwhelmingly ontological, that is, it is directed towards the animals’ being, as defined by the zoological frame of display, to be observed. According to the director of VIVID, Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, with this work, Billingham’s camera becomes a ‘metaphor for [the surrogate] desire to look’ (2006: 109). And this ‘scopophilic’ (Hansen 2007b) structure – and the interplay between power, domination and repression implied in the optics of that structure – corresponds to the detached exposure of his camera practice as witnessed in his family photos and borderline-voyeuristic home-movies (see Chapter 3). In fact, the invasiveness and exposure involved in this earlier work still profoundly inform Billingham’s approach. During the first year of the residency, he was working with production

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assistants in VIVID, editing several reels of super-8 footage of his family taken between 1997 and 1998. And it’s difficult not to recall Billingham’s earliest studies of his father relative to this later development. Specifically, those disturbing yet absorbing images of Ray in his bedroom, confined to the grim (pen-like) interior, drinking himself unconscious over and over, with the artist observing, witnessing an existential situation extemporized in his midst; his son, the spectator, engaged in the documentation of a filial condition beyond voyeurism or entertainment. One of the more compelling exhibits in Who’s Looking at the Family? (1994) (see Chapter 1) was a project originally commissioned by Michael Collins for the Telegraph Magazine where two London Zoo gorillas (Salome and Asali) were supplied with cameras.2 Most surprising about the consequent exposures is not primarily the manner in which these ‘pictures’ subvert the codes of observer and observed or indeed the way in which the human visitors in the photos appear ‘as if ’ enclosed behind bars (James 2006: 123). It is rather the way that these modes of perception seem ruled out a priori by these images – where the dominance of the gaze remains protected by an irreversible and systematic top-down hierarchy, Collins’s simple but profound experiment achieves a more subtle transposition of perspective (something like a phenomenological ‘Gestalt switch’) which, although doing nothing to challenge the hierarchy of the gaze, yet enables a momentary critical reversal of what Peter James refers to as the ‘psychological space’ of the zoo whereby the characteristic look of the zoo animal is converted into the look at the animal (James 2006: 123). Because what these photos reveal is the typical expression that we adopt when looking at zoo animals. This is what is apprehended in the sudden and fugitive reorientation of subjectivities unintentionally enacted in these images. Yet rather than accomplishing a kind of hypothetical occupation of the experience of the zoo animal in a (filmic) point-of-view tableau, what we find subtly insinuated instead in the anthropocentric gaze inverted by the apes through the bars of their enclosure (and reciprocated by viewers of the subsequent photos) is the impoverishment of the zoo animal’s world. What is glimpsed in that asymmetrical instant of zoological looking, in other words, is the acknowledgement (in the eye contact refracted through the camera lens) of the condition referred to explicitly in Berger’s essay as the animal’s ‘marginalization’ (Berger 2009b). That is why curator of the Barbican show, Val Williams was struck (predictably) at the time by the ‘unpleasantness’ of the photos which she associated with the resulting perspectival switch, ‘for when people look at apes’, she now noticed, ‘they appear a little less than human’ (Williams 1994: 56). It is tempting to imagine the young final-year art student in his first high-profile exhibition sensing an obscure analogy between the photographs of his father and the apes of London Zoo. Perhaps this experience prefigured a future way of exploring his father’s existential predicament through an allegorical appropriation of the zoo animal’s perspective. In one of the contextual essays accompanying the publication of Billingham’s Zoo project (Billingham 2006) Peter James, keeper of

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photographs at Birmingham Central Library, makes a relevant point. The artist’s interest in the zoo, he writes, is as an environment in which the traumatized animals’ efforts to adapt to the ‘confined spaces’ of their artificial habitats become available for examination (James 2006: 126). Considered in this way, the photographs and videos of Billingham’s Zoo project, he argues, provide a significant retrospective ‘insight into his family life in a tower block’ (2006: 126). With this observation the more personal existential objective of the project is brought to light. It could be argued that, through studying the captive animal’s behaviour, the artist is struggling to achieve an understanding of his own traumatic childhood experience (the loss of his family home and peremptory relocation to the brutalist environment of the high-rise housing estate). Perhaps a less premeditated motivation of the project is the retrospective analysis of his own traumatic attempt to adapt to the adverse experience of moving to the unfamiliar milieu of the tower block. Through examining the zoo animal in its enclosure, not only observing the animal but also acknowledging – and even identifying with – the animal’s ontological predicament, can Billingham come to some understanding, acknowledgement (and ultimately achieve some kind of closure) regarding his father’s witnessed descent into alcoholism and agoraphobia?

Reframing the animal Reviewing the debut exhibition of Zoo at the Compton Verney Gallery in 2006, Rikke Hansen emphasized the show’s ‘contextual and discursive’ framing. Picking up on a passage in Berger that assimilates the ‘cage’ to a ‘frame round the animal inside it’ (Berger 2009b: 33) Hansen remarks of Billingham’s camera that its fixation ‘on the enclosure’ reciprocates the geometry of the spatial internment, accentuating the animal’s sense of ‘entrapment’ (Hansen 2007a: 30–1). As the live physical form enters the ‘static’ frame, Hansen suggests, the animal’s ‘suffering’ is reconfigured as an operation of pictorial space (2007a: 31; 2007b). For this show, a sequence of moving-image projections was extricated from extended footage: mostly silent, single-channel short videotape loops (of a polar bear, elephants, a chimpanzee, gorillas, a tiger, giraffes, a bear, a tapir, a lemur, penguins and a kea bird [with sound]). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s esoteric discussion of pictorial framing (from his text The Truth in Painting [1987]) Hansen suggests that the frame’s function to categorically differentiate between what’s inside and outside the work simultaneously enables a cognitive interaction to take place between interior and exterior. Neither strictly inside nor outside, the frame itself however represents a kind of ‘hybrid of outside and inside’ (1987: 63). What Derrida (following Kantian logic) styles the parergon of the pictorial frame represents, roughly, an element of the aesthetic work which is neither properly internal to nor an integral part of the

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actual work (ergon) and yet which nevertheless seems to belong to the work in a peripheral (but yet somehow essential) way as a ‘surplus, an addition, an adjunct . . . a supplement’ (1987: 57). With this reference, Hansen suggests that the parergon of the frame parallels the interplay of interior (private) and exterior (public) played out in the problem of the zoo. Entering the frame, the animal, repeatedly recaptured by the video recording process, is seen compulsively retracing the limits of its compound, again and again, and in this manner, its state of confinement is reciprocated by the video and photographic framing. Yet Hansen insists that this does not reproduce (or contribute to) the suffering of the animal (Hansen 2007a: 31). Even if it appears to provide substantial evidence of the animal’s trauma, Billingham’s videos merely register an aspect of the zoo animal’s behaviour. Because the animal’s suffering is at best mediated, that is, re-presented (and, by definition, a simulacrum of suffering, and therefore not the ‘real thing’) this ensures that (its) suffering is left outside the frame. ‘Occasionally’, Hansen even admits, ‘the rhythmic movements become pleasurable to watch, like some strange dance’. An exception to Billingham’s static fixed-frame procedure is Kea (2005) in which the hand-held camera (in a similar mode to the camcorder following the weasel-ball in Fishtank) relentlessly pursues the demented caged choreography of the bird; and, as there is sound in this video, we hear its eerie cry. ‘You do not want to enjoy this,’ she adds in a troubling afterthought, ‘but you do’ (2007a: 31; 2007b). Is it possible to reassure ourselves that the suffering of the animal doesn’t enter the photographic frame? To refer again to Derrida’s analysis, is it not precisely via the hybrid (or lever) of the frame that the unrepresented external world (in this case the animals’ suffering) enters pictorial space? Arguing that it is misleading to depict the frame as an impermeable boundary – for it is precisely the frame, Derrida insists, that constitutes the mechanism of communicative interaction between the inside and the outside of photographic space – involves accepting that it may not be possible for art to realize (or assuage) the suffering of the sentient animal. And yet, even as we reassure ourselves (like Hansen) that the animal’s suffering is not ‘caused’ by the work, when we witness the zoo animal enter, leave and return to the static frame of Billingham’s lens, over and over, this activity somehow re-enacts the animal’s compulsive behaviour through the permeability of the photographic frame. In this breaching of frame, I would maintain, the animal’s physical behaviour enters photographic space as a precise expression of its psychological state. Admitting that he finds the spectacle of ‘a tiger pacing or looping its enclosure cruel and beautiful at the same time’ (2006: 109), at some point during the research for the zoo project, Billingham became fascinated by the repetitive behaviour of the captive animals. Initially, this fascination was formal (a matter of capturing dynamic kinetic content within a static framework) but later the sight of the

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agitated animal compulsively shifting around in a restricted, circumscribed space began, inevitably, to assume upsetting abject characteristics confirmatory of the paradigm shift in the question of the animal (and animal welfare in general) initiated by Jeremy Bentham’s inquiry: ‘The question is not’, Bentham insists, ‘Can [animals] reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (quoted in Singer 2000: 33). The suffering of the zoo animal doesn’t need to be re-presented because it viscerally permeates every aspect of Billingham’s footage. Pacing and swaying and bar-licking and neck-twisting, compulsive head-bobbing, complete inertia, dormant torpor, the margins (parerga) of this project are haunted by raw animal suffering. Indeed, one of the most disturbing instances of compulsive behaviour is witnessed in the (compassionately short, but looped) four-minute video Gorilla (2005) (Fig. 5.1) where the great ape convulsively regurgitates the contents of his stomach into his hand before swallowing the orange-coloured bolus – again and again and again.

Animal poor in world Situating Billingham’s zoo project in a wider cultural context, Peter James traces its cultural genealogy to the rise of the zoological garden in the nineteenth century. There is, obviously, no need to repeat James’s discussion here, but one thing that is important to reiterate is the association he makes between the imperialist origin of the zoo and the early development of photography. Citing Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion made in Philadelphia Zoo at the end of the century, James draws attention to the hybrid nature of the early photographer’s visual research in relation to Billingham’s methodology. Muybridge’s consecutive images were transformed into movie-like sequences using a device known as a ‘zoopraxiscope’

FIGURE 5.1  Richard Billingham, Gorilla (2005), video projection (4m 9s) and Tapir (2005) (1m 32s). Zoo, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2007).

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(2006: 126). Convinced that he was conducting an empirical investigation, according to James, what Muybridge really succeeded in providing was the first (inadvertent) photographic evidence of the morbid behaviour – the suffering – of animals in confinement (2006: 126).3 In her review of Zoo, Hansen helpfully refers to more recent aesthetic approaches to the problem of the zoo, among them German-born UK-based contemporary artist Britta Jaschinski, who published an acclaimed photobook (called Zoo) in 1996 featuring seventy-four monochrome animal studies taken in transnational zoos (including some of the same institutions Billingham visited) (Jaschinski 1996). Reminiscent of Blossfeldt’s morphological botanical studies, the sombre photographs published in Zoo (giraffes, penguins, seals, polar bears, hyenas, chameleons, bears, elephants, gibbons, gorillas and chimps) are sculptural, suggestive and dramatically noir. Insisting that her primary motivation is aesthetic not didactic, the objective of her work, Jaschinski says, is to confer on the animal a ‘melancholy dignity’ (Jaschinski 1996). Jaschinski identifies with a tradition of portraiture rather than documentary photography. Yet her effort to acknowledge the animals’ ‘sentience’ and to respect their ‘beauty and nobility’ often results in anthropomorphized and sometimes even melodramatic pictures (as if the only way to acknowledge non-human sentience is to give it a human physiognomy – an assumption betrayed by her reference to what she believes to be the obvious ‘beauty of sentience’). Sometimes indeed a certain detail of the animal’s physiology (a paw, a prehensile tail, a snout, a fin) is sought out by the lens in a manner that suggests intentionality and dramatic suspense, producing a sympathetic response by making the animal into the subject of an implied narrative (of incarceration and emancipation). Although Jaschinski claims she would like to remain neutral on the question, her work clearly involves a robust if tacit indictment of the zoo (a photograph by her of a tiger in its miserable cell, for example, is reproduced on the cover of Randy Malamud’s institutional critique Reading Zoos [1998]). Nevertheless, she evidently intends to be provocative, desiring that her work elicit ‘unease’ in viewers. The afterword contains a brief critique of the zoo as an icon of ‘hubris’, and includes a pungent reference to the ‘dark and fetid corners’ of the animal enclosure. Steve Baker’s critical study of animals in art discusses Jaschinski’s work, referring to a more recent series (Dark) which the artist developed in the 2000s as a critique of the aesthetic rhetoric of wildlife photography. This series signifies a decisive departure from the earlier Zoo. Initially conceived as a book, Jaschinski explains that the project fell through with the downturn in the publishing industry during the 2008 recession, and as a result, remains unpublished. Baker helpfully reproduces several photographs from the series in Artist | Animal (2013). These painterly wildlife photos (also insistently monochrome and saturated with motion blur) should be compared with Billingham’s black-and-white snapshots in the Zoo photobook (especially with reference to Jaschinski’s claim that, with this book

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of images, she was ‘trying to see it from the angle of the animal rather than the viewer’) (in Baker 2013: 160). Unlike Billingham, however, it seems clear that she interprets this endeavour as consistent with avoiding the eye of the animal. Baker comments: ‘the scuzzy haze through which most of the animals seem to be seen might certainly evoke the idea of something seen from the perspective of the animal – if not that of the animal depicted then certainly that of another nonhuman animal rather than that of a wildlife photographer’ (2013: 163). Hansen also alludes to the work of Frank Noelker. Associate professor of art at the University of Connecticut, Noelker published a book of zoo photographs in 2004 entitled Captive Beauty. Like Jaschinski, the fifty pictures in this publication are characterized as ‘portraits’ to distinguish them from a documentary intentionality. Jane Goodall, in the foreword to Noelker’s book, describes his work as ‘beautiful’ yet ‘profoundly disturbing’ and goes on to recommend it for unmasking the fundamental ‘problem of the zoo’ (Goodall in Noelker 2004: ii). Yet, the only intervention Noelker’s pictures seem to make regarding this problem is to demonstrate how suffering can be anaesthetized through visual effects. For Noelker’s portraits are picturesque constructs, carefully composed and enhanced, to conform to the stylized zoomorphic conventions that appeal most to human sensitivity. Beyond the traditional codes of beautified form these images have the same sentimental function as Disney cartoons or soft furry toys. Take, for example, Polar Bear, Germany (2000). A bear cub reposes on a smooth stone slab, its fur, in the late afternoon sunlight, immaculately white, its head turned to the left, points out of frame, avoiding contact with the spectator’s gaze. The snout is moist with health and the black lips are curved in what could almost be a smile. The young polar bear seems completely contented, even happy. But the most extraordinary aspect of this image is the position of the cub’s paws: the arms are curled up under her little body with the black-tipped paws touching each other – a pose that seems (in the idiom) ‘almost human’ and so cute it’s almost heartbreaking. There is absolutely no doubt: it is a beautiful image and entirely representative of the general photogenic aesthetic of the book. No bars or wire or glass partitions are evident in the photos (apart from Antelope St. Louis 1998, but even the bars in this picture are so closeup, so out of focus, as to be rendered practically invisible). All Noelker’s animals seem relaxed, healthy, content, as well as totally unthreatening. Hansen is correct to critically distinguish Billingham’s zoo animals from Noelker’s work. When she suggests that the latter eludes the specific gaze that seeks to define the animal, she recognizes that this aversion of the look contributes crucially to the photogenic framing of the abject animal to-be-looked-at, never to look (2007a: 30; 2007b). Clearly, Billingham’s zoo photography (focused precisely on engaging ‘the eye of the animal’) involves an entirely different encounter with the non-human animal.

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But the zoo pictures of German artist Candida Höfer (Hansen makes no reference to her work4) share the closest affinities with Billingham. A former student of Hilla and Bernd Becher at Düsseldorf in the late 1970s Höfer’s interest in the conceptual implications of form reveals their mentorship. It is no surprise that Billingham is an admirer of Höfer’s5 1993 publication Zoologische Gärten, an anthology of thirty small-scale colour and eight black-and-white photographs taken in zoos in Continental Europe and the UK. Höfer’s subject is Raum – ‘space’. Fascinated by the psychology of institutional space, she interrogates the psycho-social recesses and niches of the built environment, places where intricate systems of knowledge and power are subtly rearticulated in architectural form.6 Relative to this subject, Höfer is interested in the zoo as a public construct, an architecture of containment, where living animals (as Berger also points out) are confined and put on public display as objects to be observed (Berger 2009b: 27). Zoos are places that are visited (in her odd-sounding idiom) ‘to look at “spaced” live animals’ (in Messer 2010). As an organization of space, Höfer’s aesthetic emphasizes the crude, sometimes brutalist, structures built to zone the zoo animal, tending to focus on how these environments are given definition, like the performative stage, to motivate a certain perception (of the animal-subject within the frame). This emphasis sometimes results in the exposure of paradoxes arising from the ambition to recreate token versions of the species’ natural habitat. In her photographs, as a result, the animals often blend, chameleon-like, into their surrounding recesses. The elephants of Hamburg I (1990) for example are the same functional colour and texture as their exposed brutalist cubicles and look as if moulded from raw concrete; the giraffe of the celebrated cover image (Karlsruhe Zoo I [1992]), striding across the veldt margin, becomes a camouflage pattern caught in the complex mesh-grids and interference patterns of its setting. A later photograph (not published in the photobook) shows a giraffe in front of a photograph of the Somalian savanna wallpapered around her enclosure like some cynical B-movie backprojection. The disconnect between the animal’s native environment (Umwelt) and the abject inadequacy of that imitation environment is emphatic, and, as if in critique of Heidegger’s anthropocentric proposition that the animal is ‘worlddeprived’ (weltarm) (Gray 2002: 48; Heidegger 1995: 176; 1998: 248),7 is exposed by the dysfunctional absurdity of that impoverished landscape: the poverty of this ‘world’ is all too human. A pictorial simulacrum of habitat, to the animal, seems utterly meaningless. But whatever it ultimately signifies, its moronic inadequacy discloses the lack of understanding involved in the human perception of the nonhuman world. ‘What we know about’ animals, as Berger observes, ‘is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are’ (2009b: 27).

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The eye of the animal Billingham’s approach to the zoo animal, as mentioned, is motivated by Berger’s inquiry (2009b). Beyond the (already discussed) stimulus of the rhetorical title, the artist cites a specific passage that appears early in the essay referring to the ‘eye of the animal’ which had a significant impact on his thinking (Billingham in Lack 2010).8 Here is the passage in full: The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look. (BERGER 2009b: 13)

Reflexively implicated in the question of the title, this statement in many respects represents the locus classicus of Berger’s essay. Does it address the question of the zoo animal adequately? Or does it raise intractable questions? Let us consider this study more closely. Berger’s thesis is that the animal has disappeared from society. Animal life today, he suggests, is separated from human life by a cultural chasm. And this historical process of alienation is attributed to the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century (and is curiously contemporaneous with the emergence of the phenomenon of the zoological garden). No longer required for heavy labour, the animal can be treated like another natural resource, controlled by the same logic of commodification as any industrially-refined natural product, available for unreserved human exploitation. As a result of this process the animal’s body (animals are nothing more!), Berger claims, is increasingly reified. As human reliance on (and respect for) animals diminishes, the zoo, he argues, rises as a testament to this irreversible process of systematic deprivation. With the animal’s actual physical removal from their natural environment, the (postCartesian) humanist project of mastery over animal being9 is accomplished to perfection: the wild animal’s ghettoization in an architecturally specific (public) environment, the ‘zoological garden’, the latter, especially as it evolved through the following century, recalls for Berger a dark family of dystopian sites of social privation, including – obviously – the prison, but also the tenement, the township, the slum and the concentration camp10 (Berger 2009b: 36). Berger claims that the institution of the zoo (under the scientific alibi of the ‘zoological’) is established precisely as a response to the animal’s problematic disappearance from the circle of human life. Eventually the disappeared animal, however, is forced to reappear. Displayed in their zoo enclosure (he doesn’t need

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to remind us of the affinities with the art gallery) the animal is assimilated to a frame as an object of scrutiny in an architecturally specific observation complex. Characterized as a site of ‘enforced marginalisation’, the institution of the zoo, he writes, signifies both a tacit acknowledgement of the animals’ extreme marginalized status as well an attempt to recuperate them for use-value in the form of optically consumable commodities. Yet the world-deprived animal, he says, gradually fades from our cultural view, goes out of focus, until rendered completely invisible, until it cannot really be ‘seen’. The most original aspect of Berger’s ‘familiar’ argument, according to Steve Baker, is the connection he develops between the demand for literalism in the design of animal toys, the emergence of a new realism in wildlife photography and the popular rise of public zoological gardens (Baker 1993: 13–14). Strategies of making animals reappear in the epoch of their symbolic withdrawal are connected to this phenomenon in that they constitute a collective response to the intuitive sense of the disappearance of the animal. And this, Baker comments, clarifies that Berger’s hypothesis of disappearance is fundamentally a cultural event which in its refusal to sharply distinguish between the animal and its anthropic representation accepts ‘that the animal is necessarily a construction, a representation, and not an accessible essence or reality’ (Baker 1993: 5). In one of the essay’s most powerful – and genuinely disturbing – statements, Berger proposes that when we consider an animal in a zoo enclosure, ‘even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize it’ (Berger 2009b: 34). Even when made completely transparent to perception in the zoo environment (and, of course, the institution of the zoo is merely a symptom of a more general phenomenon of cultural disappearance) Berger suggests, the animal still cannot be seen. Yet their look – that is, the unfocused animal eye that peers through the enclosure – articulates this ‘absolutely marginalised’ condition, this invisibility to human cultural perception, more explicitly than anything that could be expressed. ‘Can he see me?’ is one of the most common questions children ask in the zoo. This is because the child instinctively recognizes that the zoo animal’s look cannot be perceived, has been extinguished by the ‘empowered gaze’ (Baker 1993: 15). That is to say, the eye of the animal can in no way recognize or acknowledge the gaze being directed at them through the transparent partition, they can only look inward into an abyss, with a look that has become completely estranged to humans. Yet at the same time (and perhaps for that very reason) this look becomes expressive of their marginalized, deprived, zombified condition. Perception in a zoo, Berger writes (in a fact-value blending conclusion), is ‘always wrong’ (2009: 33). In this way the look of the animal becomes vacuous, amoral, inscrutable. Respect, dignity, acknowledgement, it suggests, is impossible to achieve in a zoo

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environment: the one thing that cannot be adapted to the petrifying, stupefying gaze, by the look that stares out perpetually from the enclosed head, is the look of the animal. In response to Berger’s thesis, Billingham, in the considered directorial largeformat photographs completed near the commencement of his research residency at VIVID, appears to endeavour to ‘muster all his concentration’ precisely to re-centralize the animal subject in the frame (and thereby mitigate the animal’s systematic ‘marginalisation’).11 Using the plate-glass–fronted enclosure as a framing device, the animal, in Billingham’s photographs, often appears at the precise point of intersection of the formal axes of the composition. But does this centralization strategy mitigate the marginalization of the animal? Are we still looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal? Focusing precisely on the look of the zoo animal – in both senses of this obscure phrase, that is, their condition, how they look, and how they look at us (and how we, in turn, look back at them looking, etc.) – Billingham’s images testify to the animals’ dual condition of deprivation, that is, to their marginalization and their disappearance; the artist dramatizes, through engaging that double predicament, the fact that the animal, despite being rendered transparent by the optical regime of the zoo (and its system of framing enclosures), still cannot be seen. As is evident from the sequence of large-format still images Sloth (2005) (Plate 28), Lion (2005), Panda (2005) (Fig. 5.2), Rhinoceros (2006), Orangutan (2006) (Fig. 5.3), Deer (2006), it is the eye of the animal within which this dual condition, paradoxically, becomes perceptible. No longer attentive and wary, it is precisely the eye, fixed in its expressionless, even paralytic stare, that conveys the essential (sensory) deprivation and impoverishment of the zoo animal’s world. Nothing dramatizes the failure of the encounter with the animal more graphically than Billingham’s attempt to engage the look of the zoo animal. In the large-scale

FIGURE 5.2  Richard Billingham, Panda (2005). C-print on aluminium (131.5 × 169 cm).

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FIGURE 5.3  Richard Billingham, Orangutan (2006). C-print on aluminium (131 × 161 cm).

photographic sequence, the animal, again and again, confronts the spectator from the exact centre of the composition. Diagonals drawn from opposite corners of the frame converge almost audaciously in a point of intersection that corresponds to the point where the animal makes eye contact with the spectator. And yet, as Berger predicts, in this radically asymmetrical exchange, the look of the zoo animal remains weirdly indecipherable. Obviously, this is no straightforward, literal condition of invisibility (nor however is it an instance of Akira Lippit’s extreme proposition in Electric Animal [2000] that animal invisibility has been super-mediated to a state of spectral insubstantiality). Rather, by visually enacting a more fundamental heritage of marginalization and estrangement, Billingham’s framed animal tableaux confirm Berger’s hypothesis of disappearance. However, the virtual disappearance in question here has something to do with the perception that the zoo animal doesn’t ‘perform’ as a ‘wild’ animal ‘should’, that is to say, to their audience, the zoo animal fails to represent their wild-animal persona adequately, and this preconception contributes to their perceived condition of ‘disappearance’ (Marvin 2006: 119).12 This relationship is especially evident in Billingham’s short video (with sound) Tiger (2005) where the animal reacts to the taunting of spectators by trying to attack them through the reinforced plate-glass screen and this thrilling ‘performance’ of the tiger’s ‘authentic’ wild state is greeted with appreciative applause, a horrible comedy, which, to the tiger, remains senseless.13 Yet even the photographs that don’t directly engage the eye of the animal in the way proposed may obliquely, but no less compellingly, indicate the condition of disappearance. The baboons in profile at the centre of Mandrills (2005) (Plate 29) for instance ‘face’ their visitors and direct the viewer’s gaze (what are they looking at?) to their spectators (our surrogates) framed in the window at the extreme left edge of the composition. The asymmetrical exchange is optically inscribed in this image where the baboon, perching on the tree stump, seems to look back

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at the (uninterested) spectators, just about visible in the margins of the frame, looking at her ‘looking’ at them (etc.) and the to and fro of the viewer’s eye as it repeatedly saccades the space between observer and observed (before the illusory photorealistic savanna backdrop), reciprocates that exchange of looks (which persists even though the spectators may not be looking at the animals).14 A subtly different take on the asymmetry of the gaze is Billingham’s photograph of a polar bear staring abjectly into a pool of rippling green water beneath the circus of spectators above it (Fig. 5.4). In a similarly indirect way, the empty cranial sockets of the bovine skull in the insectarium of Cockroaches (2005) overcompensate for the morbidly vacant look of the live zoo animal. Likewise, the reflection of light in the eye of the primate in the Baconian image Gorilla (2005) may only be a slight smudge of white streaked by violent motion blur yet, even before we have learned to look for it, it is enough to substitute for the zoo animal’s expressionless stare. Perhaps the most poignant and banal symptom of the failure to engage the look of the zoo animal (in the epoch of its disappearance) is precisely the impulse to capture the phenomenon in a photograph. The artist makes the viewer aware of the pathetic effort to encounter the animal (and hence force them to reappear) by including spectators within the frame of his shot (as well as, of course, selfreflexively circumscribing his own efforts to engage the animal through the camera in this critique). Some of Billingham’s photographs (and videos) semisubversively include visitors taking photos with cameraphones held up in that vacuous gesture. Indeed, the artist frequently points out that this project coincided with the advance of integrated digital technology when the telecommunications industry started to incorporate cameras into their mobile devices. Perception of the zoo animal is now mediated through ‘exposures’, which are, for the first time since the instamatic process, immediately available to view (and delete or keep) as jpeg pics on the LED screen.15 Bear Pit (2006) (Plate 30), the final image in the sequence of large-format directorial photographs (included in the Zoo publication), presents an empty enclosure. In this photograph, taken at night using long exposure, the animal literally does not appear. And in the actual physical absence of the animal the poverty of its artificial environment (its ‘world’) is brutally exposed. Clearly, the

FIGURE 5.4  Richard Billingham, Polar Bear (2001–6). C-print on aluminium (53 × 79 cm).

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imitation terrain doesn’t correspond to any authentic rock formation or represent the product of authentic research of the species’ natural environment; it is merely the result of an anonymous designer’s pseudo-impression of ‘some ursine territory’.16 This concluding image invites interpretation as a response to the central argument of Berger’s essay that the zoo represents a monument to the animal’s disappearance. Compelled to reappear in the zoo, the wild animal, framed in its enclosure, is forced to live a reified life as a product of mass observation. Yet in this instance the animal conspicuously fails to appear. Can that manifest failure, that conspicuous absence, be coded as an implicit refusal? When this photograph is framed in a gallery (curated for an exhibition or located at the end of a sequence of published images) the scene refuses to be rationalized in an arbitrarily neutral way (an empty enclosure, empty for reasons, such as, for instance, the bear is sleeping, or feeding, or in its den, or removed for medical attention, etc.) and assumes an alternative negative signification. In the art gallery, at this meta-level, that is, it becomes difficult to avoid inferring a level of intentionality in the emptiness of the enclosure, a deliberate refusal to appear, a purposeful rebuff. We interpret the animal’s invisibility, in other words, as a kind of silent articulation of non-consent to the subjugation of the gaze, and, by extension, a refusal of subordination as such, a general NO to that ‘subjection of the animal’, which, as Jacques Derrida makes clear, ‘can be called violence in the most morally neutral sense of the term’ (2008: 25). Although correct to indicate the affinities between the zoo and the art gallery, Berger doesn’t develop these affinities beyond a casual aside. One of the things Billingham’s project exposes is the significant difference between the two institutions (suggesting in this critique perhaps the influence of Höfer): such that in the gallery (or exhibition) context, not only is the spectator made conscious of the asymmetrical exchange of looks between the non-human animal and its human spectator but also compelled to acknowledge that, in being presented with the vivid evidence of the process of marginalization represented by the stark deprivation of the zoo animal’s world, the systematic subjection of the animal is revealed, and with it the appalling history of that subjection, which, as Derrida observes, constitutes a ‘great sorrow of nature’ (2008: 19). It must be recalled here that many of the photographs in Ray’s a Laugh instinctually search out the eye of the animal. Perhaps this is most evident in the wildlife studies interspersed through the sequence (RAL #14, #34, #44 pp. 26–7, 62–3, 82–3) where the focus on the creature at the nucleus of the composition, to an extent that the young artist was possibly unaware of at the time, expresses the vivid energy of the small living form through the intensity of its eye (Billingham 2018). Even the pictures that integrate domestic pets (if sometimes inadvertently) into the frame, the eye of the animal is detected by the lens. Witness, for instance, the spitting cat hidden among the curios of the dresser in RAL #50 (pp. 92–3 EE:

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Pl. 49): turned a phosphorescent turquoise in the reflection of the flash, the cat’s eye is scarily intense. Equally intense but less severe, the sentient brown eyes of the dog in #43 (pp. 80–1) (Plate 9) ironically deputize for Ray’s oblivious failure to engage with the camera.17 More seriously, in #45 (pp. 84–5) (Fig. 2.6) the aftermath of a fight, the blood-red eyes of the dog in the armchair at the right of the shot have witnessed the passing altercation. Finally, one of the enlarged close-up and unfocused animal snapshots in Sensation (1997) (subsequently shown in the I Am A Camera exhibition in the Saatchi gallery in 2000) focuses most dramatically – and, in a way that anticipates the later Zoo images, disconcertingly – on the eyes of Ray’s dog (Plate 31). Simultaneously familiar and strange, the eye (more than the controversial notion of the animal ‘face’) is that point of specificity and contact where another species is recognized as an analogous being (through its mutual ability to acknowledge another living presence) and yet also simultaneously where it appears utterly dissimilar in its enigmatic manifestation of animal sentience. As it appears in Billingham’s early snapshots, the eye of the animal, in its distinct familiarity, is yet precisely where the otherness of the animal is most intensely concentrated. Yet, as clarified in the contrast between these two projects, the eye of the zoo creature is radically (if often imperceptibly) different in its manifestation of animal consciousness. But what is expressed through the captive animal’s eye has perhaps less to do with animal consciousness and more to do with loss of environment – reduction, deprivation, the impoverishment of world – evidence, in other words, of that dual condition of marginalization and disappearance identified by Berger, following Heidegger. Is that difference perceptible through the photographic process? And, if so, how is it mediated by Billingham’s camera?

The animal as other A monochrome snapshot taken late in the project, Untitled Elephant (2006) (Fig. 5.5), is perhaps the most abject image of animal confinement associated with Billingham’s Zoo. In this sombre photograph, the animal looks out from behind the bolted bars of its cage; the totality and brutality of its internment is reinforced by the padlocks securing the steel grills outside. Indeed, the cage, in this explicit image of animal imprisonment, has more salience than the creature it contains. Jammed right up against the bars ‘less than a foot from us’, the elephant seems too large for its container and its terrible claustrophobia is palpable. In this image we are confronted again, to use Berger’s arresting phrase, with something rendered absolutely marginal. What this image makes explicit is the fact that the animal, even in this wretched state, is insistently presented for display. Although remanded, Billingham’s elephant remains accessible to observation through the grid-like shuttering of its barred container. Yet the transparency of its

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FIGURE 5.5  Richard Billingham, Untitled (Elephant) (2006). Black and white photograph on aluminium (130 × 194 cm).

cage is compromised by the darkness of the photograph which, between the bars and at the crepuscular edges of the composition, is almost completely shrouded in shadow. Partially legible between the rails of its black and murky enclosure, the elephant with its enormous tusks, thicker than the steel bars and its trunk halfheartedly buried in straw, looks out at us. Just above the optical centre of all this encaged blackness the lucid eye of the elephant flashes out from the massive hulk of its skull. Eye contact is achieved in a completely different way in this snapshot than in the large-format directorial photographs. When exhibited, this image is typically enlarged to an expansive scale (as large as possible, in fact, appropriate to the gallery space) in order to create a monumental and immersive effect. At this scale, the artist says, the scene becomes ‘grave’ and the connotations of the eye, transfixed in the singularity and clarity of that ‘bottomless’ look, become impossible to evade (Billingham 2018). Once engaged at this scale, indeed, that singular eye seems to insist, beyond all anthropomorphic analogy, empathy, transcendence or even morality, on its irreducible non-human otherness and on acknowledging this specificity in its visibility and its ineluctable presence. Looking, are we looked at in return? Looking. ‘As with every bottomless gaze’, Derrida writes, ‘as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman . . .’ (Derrida 2008: 12). Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of the (philosophical) question of the nonhuman animal singularizes what ‘we’ call ‘animal’ as the ‘wholly other’ (2008: 13)

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and proceeds to argue that it is precisely because of their irreducible specificity (in relation to humanity) that animals deserve ethical consideration. (According to Derrida, it is an irrational and vulgar ‘anthropocentric prejudice’ to exclude the non-human animal from the domain of ethical concern.) For if I acknowledge that I am responsible for the other (consistent with Levinas’s ethical theory which Derrida accepts) isn’t the animal ‘more other still, more radically other?’ Derrida asks (2008: 107). And intimately related to this moral inquiry, he claims, is the question of the look of the animal and how their otherness is expressed in the look they direct towards humans. What does being looked at by the animal involve? The state of being seen (and recognizing the fact of being seen by an animal), that we cannot but respond to, and the animal’s recognition of our look, Derrida suggests, are crucial for the structure of moral responsibility relevant to the non-human animal (which, for him, often coincides with the expression of vulnerability, powerlessness or exposure). ‘For a thinking of the other, of the infinitely other [apropos Levinas] who looks at me, should’ therefore, he insists, ‘privilege the question and the request of the animal’ (2008: 113). Yet relatively few philosophical or ethical discussions of the non-human animal, Derrida observes, seriously consider how the animal ‘looks’ (Berger isn’t mentioned); and this is doubly odd, he says, for are we not addressed by the other of the animal precisely through the eye? Despite innumerable cases of the human observation of animals – reflection on, analysis and examination of animals – very rarely has the thematic gaze at the animal ‘intersected with that of an animal directed [back] at [human observers]’. Such observers indeed seem never to have paid the slightest attention to the fact of being ‘seen seen by the animal’ (2008: 13, original emphasis). ‘They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that the animal could, facing them, look at them,’ Derrida points out, and ‘without a word, address them’, They have taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin. (DERRIDA 2008: 13)

Chimpanzee (2006) (Plate 32) is a five-minute single-channel close-up video projection of an elderly ape lying among the straw in the primate enclosure of London Zoo. The chimp’s blue-black hair is shot through with grizzled, greying fur and, amid the bands and bars of reflective light on the surface of the glass, the sideways head comes into focus. As the camera locates the eye, the chimp drifts in and out of sleep. Suddenly the eyes click open, becoming wider as they begin to focus. He looks drowsily into space. Then, almost in recognition and realization, the eyes perceptibly go blank and vacuous, their bright vividness succeeded by that distinctive zoo

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cast of vacant resignation, before slowly closing as he falls asleep once more. In a fascinating microscopic detail, the environment becomes visible in miniature on the ocular surface of the eye: through the light refracted on those convex lenses we see a virtual image of what the chimp sees when he wakes. Soon after falling asleep, he awakens with the same brightness (is it expectancy? anticipation?) in his brown eyes, until, yet again, they begin to glaze over, slowly close; and he eventually falls asleep once more. This threshold state is repeated ad infinitum (the video, somewhat cruelly, is on a loop, exacerbating the repetitiveness of the cycle). He wakes up, he sleeps: again and again and again . . . But are we not guilty of an anthropocentric projection in interpreting this habitual (and almost inactive) animal behaviour in this way? Is it legitimate to ascribe this level of meaning to a primate’s compulsive repetitive (perhaps irrational) behaviour? Perhaps. Maybe the ape is merely waking from a dream. Yet even if this is the case, is something significant not revealed in capturing this animal dream? Is it perceptible in his face? Is something, beyond scepticism, not conveyed by Billingham’s recording of this event of subliminal transition? Something, indeed, that becomes increasingly vivid in the changing expression (from optimism to resignation?) witnessed in those anthropoid eyes, something, finally, which suggests loss, and, specifically, loss of the will to live? In her brief discussion of this work, Yasmeen Baig-Clifford revealingly comments that this look will be ‘familiar to those with an elderly relative’. The old chimp, she writes, appears ‘to gaze, it reflects back and this suggests sentience’ (2006: 111, original emphasis). Apropos the video pieces included in the first exhibition of Zoo at Compton Verney, Rikke Hansen critiqued the artist’s emphasis on what she calls the ‘bigger charismatic animals’ (2007a: 31). Commenting on Billingham’s tendency to humanize or anthropomorphize, the majority of animals in this work, she observes, ‘have “faces”’ (2007a: 31). Indeed, we made an identical critical observation apropos Jaschinski’s work above. However, disregarding assumptions momentarily, it may in fact now (having fully discussed Billingham’s work) be reasonable to ask: Is it always a symptom of anthropomorphism to accept that animals can possess a recognizable face? This is not the same as projecting a human physiognomy onto the non-human animal. It is to argue rather that it is not only humans who can be regarded as having a ‘face’.18 As Derrida controversially argues in his brilliant and lucid analysis of the question of the animal, this acceptance, although counter-intuitive, even borderline scandalous, may in fact be crucial to how we configure the ethical consideration and moral welfare of animals. In a prolonged philosophical exchange with his late spiritual mentor Levinas, Derrida reiterates (and accepts a priori) that the face is where the irreducible otherness of another singular being is most unavoidably exposed: what he calls (following Levinas’s concept of alterity) the ‘epiphany of the face’ signifies an ethical address that represents an inviolable moral boundary

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(ultimately coinciding for Levinas with the injunction not to kill) (Derrida 2008: 110). But does the animal have a face (that prohibits harm with impunity)? (2008: 110). Levinas answers: No. Thus, Derrida demonstrates that, just like his nemesis, Heidegger, and along with the entire post-Cartesian heritage that he believes he’s put in question, Levinas cannot accept this datum. By raising the deceptively simple question (of the animal’s face) Derrida exposes a serious non sequitur at the core of Levinasian ethical theory, namely, its refusal to attribute the ‘epiphany’ of the face to the animal (‘to have a face is to be able to respond or answer, by means of the “Here I am,” before the other and for the other’). With the force of his blunt refusal of face Levinas displays a fundamental ‘anthropocentrism and humanism’, as well as exposing a profound ‘zoophobia’ at the foundation of his moral philosophy that irrationally excludes the non-human animal, yet again, from what Derrida calls the ‘circuit’ of ethical responsibility – simply because the animal is perceived not to possess the condition required to elicit a moral response from us (namely: a face) and thereby cannot make an ethical claim on ‘us’ (2008: 109, 113). This is an astonishing conclusion. What Derrida’s critique establishes in other words is that it may be a morally significant principle to question the anthropocentrism that refuses to give the animal a face (but this is emphatically not an argument, it is necessary to add, for projecting a human physiognomy onto the non-human animal). Specifying that Chimpanzee should be projected at a very large scale (the installation shots of the 2006 Compton Verney exhibition give a good impression of the size relative to the gallery space [Billingham 2006]) Billingham sets up the isolated video of the face of the chimp to command an entire room on its own in order to generate an immersive effect: ‘I like the idea,’ the artist says, of the viewer being ‘immersed in the movements, in this madness’ (Billingham 2018). Because of the exclusive attention that it can apply to the repetitive activity of the animals, according to the artist, silent video achieves a more effective and intrusive psychosomatic impression of the trauma-induced symptomatic behaviour of the confined animal. Perhaps it is because, in the gallery space, the silent videos are choreographed in clusters of large-scale projections, thereby generating an overwhelming syndrome effect, enacting, by juxtaposition, what Billingham calls the ‘existential absurdity’ of the animals’ condition through this immersive, even satanic, danse macabre.19 A silent one-and-a-half-minute video recorded in Copenhagen zoo – Tapir (2005) (Fig. 5.6) – also focuses on the eye of the animal but to different effect. This short film records the behaviour of what appears to be a Malayan Tapir (Tapirus indicus). As the animal compulsively bobs its head, a strange phenomenon occurs. Before its eye closes, a white membrane twitchingly ascends from inside the eyelid to occlude the surface of the eye. Basically, the animal winks. But prior to this action, the layer, like a translucent shutter, appears briefly over its eye. Located inside the eyelid proper, this inner membrane, called the ‘nictating eyelid’ or ‘haw’,

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FIGURE 5.6  Richard Billingham, Tapir (2005). Single-screen video installation for monitor (1m 32s), dimensions variable.

is a protective palpebral sheath present in vestigial form in certain mammals. Like the appendix in humans, its function in mammals (such as the domestic cat) is undetermined, but it is thought to be a tear-film that applies moisture evenly over the cornea to protect from dust and other particulate dirt. Retraction of the eyeball stimulates specific muscles so that the inner eyelid can voluntarily move across the surface of the eye, and it is quite possible that Billingham’s tapir has learned to engage this muscle to repetitively activate the membrane (perhaps even to attract visitors’ attention). The tapir, a crepuscular species, however, is known to have poor eyesight and is susceptible in captivity to deteriorative corneal conditions. Whatever this odd blinking action signifies, and however she manages it, this is the behavioural subroutine specific to this animal, a behavioural tic repeated compulsively – day in, day out (Billingham 2018). The provenance of this video is important. Following a day’s (unsuccessful) filming in Copenhagen Zoo, the artist was having an evening meal in a bar near the zoo, when he noticed an agitated lady pestering the customers, interrogating them about how they had spent their day. Before she arrived at Billingham’s table, he decided to engage her, and answered her question honestly. And when he told her that he’d spent his day in the zoo photographing the tapir, she replied incredulously . . . the tapir? And proceeded to inform the artist about her special bond with this animal. Apparently,

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she told him that she had spent several years observing the tapir in Copenhagen Zoo, studying the animal and drawing it, trying to capture this strange repetitive blinking activity. She went on, discussing the animal’s stereotypic behavioural patterns and instructing Billingham about its other characteristic neuro-physiological traits: ‘she could tell me everything about the tapir. And then I went back [to the zoo] the next day and I made much better footage’ (Billingham 2018). Based on this amateur enthusiast’s instinctual personal connection with a specific zoo animal, in other words, the artist acquired critical insight into the animal’s biography and psychological condition such that he could tacitly apply this knowledge to the more effective (and intuitively perceptive) photographic inscription of animal behaviour on film. Often the most effective and useful research (Billingham comments of this experience) is elicited from such serendipitous conversations with habitual visitors to the zoo. Most zoos, he explains, in his experience, have obsessive people (such as the strange lady in this story) who visit the zoo regularly and habitually, and end up forming a special relationship with one or other of the animals (Billingham 2018). Talking to these marginalised people that went to the zoo each day – I don’t know, for comfort, to get some meaning out of their life – they’d have a relationship (not a real one) but they’d have a favourite animal that they’d know all about because they’d watched it so much. That knowledge is gold-dust, you know. If you’re trying to film . . . (BILLINGHAM 2018)

Billingham is fascinated by amateur knowledge and one of his many parallel concerns relates to the retrieval of lost unaffiliated research by outsider enthusiasts. In fact he seems to identify with the figure of the obsessive autodidact studying away in obscurity – isolated from conventional frameworks of knowledge – driven only by a lifetime’s compulsive curiosity to discover as much as possible about some specific subject (and, at that, typically a highly tangential aspect of this subject) and, in the process, inadvertently making some valuable (but often unrecognized) contribution to knowledge culture. Exploring the internet for archival material posted on auction websites (such as eBay) by relatives of past enthusiasts who have inherited this material among bequeathed effects yet are reluctant to dispose of it, Billingham collects research data accumulated by outsider enthusiasts and is especially attracted to eclectic collections of field documentary 8mm, super-8 and video footage, treating it as a kind of excavation and retrieval of a subculture of self-initiated knowledge unprejudiced by the prescriptions of institutional epistemological regimes. Later, at the zoo, he found himself inadvertently seeking such outsider enthusiasts, the ‘marginalised’ chronic zoo visitor, who can ‘show you .  .  . they [can] tell you things’. Like that ‘woman told me about the tapir, the way it

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blinked – it blinks in a very particular way – so I focused the camera on its eyeball. And it was more powerful’ (Billingham 2018). Perhaps such ‘marginalized’ people visit the zoo obsessively and develop a relationship with the animals because they inherently identify with the zoo animal’s predicament. If this is the case, it adds another analytic layer of evidential substance to Berger’s thesis of ‘absolute marginalization’, providing unexpected empirical verification for his argument. If you think about it, it makes sense. If you got nothing, you may as well . . . spend all day everyday watching your favourite animal. They must be comforting for them or something. Or maybe they think the animal is in a similar situation to them; maybe they feel trapped or . . . (BILLINGHAM 2018)

Conclusion: Trauma and Umwelt Towards the end of Billingham’s VIVID residency, his mother died suddenly. She had been living alone in a ground-floor maisonette since 2003 when Ray was transferred to a residential care centre in Cradley Heath (Watkins 2004: 40).20 Recognized for her house-proudness, apparently, Liz had arrangements of flowering plants all around the front door of her home. Following her death, however, most of her possessions had to be disposed of or donated to charity shops. When clearing out the house, however, the bereaved artist discovered some family photo albums among the familiar reef of jigsaw puzzles, trinkets and ornaments she had accumulated over the years.21 These albums contained childhood photos of Richard and his younger brother on family trips to Dudley Zoo taken during the time when they lived in the house on Sidaway Street. They also included many pictures of zoo animals. Three of these snapshots dated (circa) 1975 (Richard would have been five or six at the time) are reproduced in the Zoo photobook. Rediscovering this personal photographic archive had a profound (and poignant) influence on the final phase and ultimate direction of Billingham’s zoo project. He remarks that he was suddenly struck by the ‘innocence’ of his mother’s pictures, taken, ‘as if she was unaware of the absurdity of the captive animal’s predicament’ (Billingham in MacDonald 2007). By virtue of this late epiphany, the project was given renewed motivation. Departing from the largeformat directorial technique implemented in the initial stages of the project, Billingham returned to the casual snapshot aesthetic of his early practice with a reawakened ‘postmemory’ motivation (Hirsch 1997) – informed, that is, by the latent memories reactivated through the posthumous discovery of his mother’s photo albums. Refracted through this post-historical archive, in other words, the intentionality of the project was elucidated as a photographic method of invoking nostalgic (in the precise etymological sense of ‘longing for home’)

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childhood memories of the era before his family’s displacement to the tower block in the early 1980s. Billingham discovered in his mother’s amateur photography a highly enabling means of connecting the theme of the research project with its underlying existential motivation; and this critical convergence not only involved a postmemorial reconnection with childhood (and therefore an experiential explanation for the interest in his zoo) but also a phenomenological method of exploring his identification with the zoo animal’s predicament. What he ultimately rediscovered, that is, was a refreshingly naïve application which, when appropriated in a knowing and reflexive way, unlocked subsurface nostalgic (in the etymological sense) connections in the project, and obscurely intimating, as we will consider, the future direction of his practice.22 He noticed for the first time that some of Liz’s pictures (and postcards) were framed and hung on the walls of her home. ‘They seemed more significant now that the flat was empty’ (in Baig-Clifford 2006: 112). Deliberately acquiring inexpensive unbranded cameras with plastic lenses (his so-called crappy-cameras) Billingham went back to the zoo to take snapshot images in the attempt to knowingly revitalize the project with the awkward immediacy of amateur photography (a method which possesses its own idiosyncratic material cultural connotations) uninfluenced by prescriptive aesthetic standards, and with this process, achieved what Rosalind Krauss has termed a performative ‘retrieval of the “amateur”’ that powerfully accesses the ‘cognitive powers of childhood’ (Krauss 1999: 304–5). This sequence of candid snapshot-type images is published in the third section of the Zoo photobook (Photographs II, Billingham 2006: 76–108). Rediscovery of Liz’s photo albums confirmed that his approach from the project’s inception was informed by subconscious memories of daytrips to the zoo in the era before the family’s resettlement in the council estate. Yet reference in the discussion above to his obsession with the failure of the zoo animal to adapt to its artificial habitat also suggests a certain subliminal psychological motivation connected in some intuitive way to this formative period. I propose, in conclusion, that Billingham’s zoo research is profoundly related to his own experience of displacement (and deprivation) and that, because of this, the zoological project constitutes an important site of convergence of his aesthetic practice. Invariably, as we have considered, the movingimage sequences of Zoo focus on the trauma-induced compulsive behaviour of the captive animal (which can be regarded as symptomatic of a fundamental disorientation and witnessed in their futile sensorimotor attempts to adapt – interminably and purposelessly repeated – to a simulated, radically delimited and meaningless habitat). Recognition of the hereditary (or ‘post-memorial’) affinity between his mother’s amateur snapshots and the development of his sophisticated pictorial practice reveals, however obliquely and indistinctly, an intimate emotional association between Billingham’s preoccupation with the zoo animal and his own experience of displacement (and deprivation). Throughout its heterogeneous elements, the

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zoo research ultimately represents a concern with the predicament of the zoo animal; what remains consistent through its various phases, that is, is an implicit identification with the animal’s loss (or poverty) of world, deprivation, that is, of what theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll has usefully characterized as Umwelt [habitat]. This untranslated ecological concept refers to a sentient organism’s ‘perceptual life-world’, and can be defined – approximately – as a composite evolutionary map of external (environmental ecosystem) and internal (phenomenological-symbolic) worlds (Uexküll 2010; Sagan 2010: 2). According to Uexküll, the animal’s Umwelt (its species-specific map of their perceptual worldspace) is intimately related to another symbolically coded construct, namely, Heimat (i.e. Home) (Uexküll 2010; Sebeok 1994: 46). Bio-semiotician Thomas Sebeok renegotiates Uexküll’s Umwelt through a semiotic conceptual framework, redefining it as the ‘subjective world each animal models out of its “true” environment (Natur, reality) which reveals itself solely through signs’ (1994: 11). In a way, this makes it quite clear that, firstly, the phenomenological, territorial map is precisely what the zoo animal has been deprived of, and, secondly, that it doesn’t make a difference if the animal was born in captivity. For, according to Umwelt-theory, the predicament of the zoo animal cannot simply be understood in terms of estrangement from their natural ecosystem (the animal’s actual physical surroundings) but rather, more precisely, represents a fundamental phenotypical alienation from Umwelt-Heimat, that is, from the animal’s inherited dwelling, their sense of belonging to a speciesrelevant, articulated ecological ‘habitat’, necessary not just for the local purposes of orientation and security, but for their continued survival (Uexküll 2010: 102– 3). Loss of this evolutionary-biological link to dwelling (or territorial ecosystem) results (as we have seen) in the traumatized animal’s futile repetitive attempts to adapt to the limitations of its pseudo-environment as viscerally documented in Billingham’s zoo footage. Beyond generalized and vague references to dysfunction and social disadvantage determined by unemployment, socio-economic insecurity and poverty, many discussions of trauma in Billingham’s work fail to specify the source of the trauma and consequently fail to provide a convincing analysis of its psycho-social causality.23 Much has been made of the experience of ‘chronic’ alcoholism, sudden extreme poverty and sporadic domestic violence in his early family life, but less about experience of loss of home and displacement to the unfamiliar ‘threatening’ environment of the housing block (a displacement which, as discussed in Chapter 1, had a profound emotional impact on the young Richard) (Billingham 2018). Identification with the animal’s predicament (and specifically its impoverishment of Umwelt) in the zoo project, as argued, is complexly related to the traumatic experience of suddenly losing the security and belonging associated with home or in Uexküll’s terms, Umwelt. According to Sebeok, the eco-semiotic category of Umwelt is not confined to the (non-human) animal and should be understood in

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anthropological as well as zoological terms, that is, the concept applies to human as well as animal phenomenology, applying specifically to how habitat is signified through self-representation: ‘Any observer’s version of his / her Umwelt will be one unique model of the world, which’, Sebeok claims, ‘is a system of signs made up of generic factors plus a cocktail of experiences, including future expectations’ (Sebeok 1994: 11–12). Recall the curious fact that none of the Black Country photographs (directly) feature the Cradley Heath tower blocks and yet were all, revealingly, taken within a small radius, specifically within walking distance, of the Sidaway Street terrace which was his home until he was thirteen. (Compare, in this connection, the diagrams of territory and Heimat in Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans [2010].) Through observing the captive animal’s trauma-induced compulsive behaviour Billingham motivates a retrospective examination of the loss of his childhood habitat and his traumatic attempt to adapt following his family’s relocation to the housing block. Indeed, the validity of this interpretation (despite the artist’s resistance to the idea24) was explicitly confirmed in the major survey show People, Places, Animals, curated by Juliana Engberg in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2007 which, for the first time, installed the earliest studies of his father alongside the Cradley Heath townscapes and the zoo project photographs (and videos) (Engberg 2007). This exhibition clearly established the cumulative continuity of Billingham’s oeuvre with reference to the (ecological) theory of habitat (elaborated in the previous three chapters of this book). Remember that Billingham not only witnessed his father’s alcoholic decline and withdrawal from the world but also documented it. Here was a man enclosed in a confined space, rendered absolutely marginal, regressing to repetitive stereotypical behaviour, killing time in preparation for death; just as the zoo animal’s traumatic experience is conveyed through physiological ‘movement, gestures and expressions’ – evidence of the ‘presence’ of ‘pain and suffering’ – Billingham’s early photographs, through the distinctive severity of their direct, forensic realism elicit unconditioned responses of empathy that reject ‘overidentification’ with conventional symbols of dramatic suffering but rather, through their realism, evoke what Stanley Cavell calls acknowledgement of – or exposure to – irreducible otherness of another living being (Cavell 1996: 68). And yet, it seems to me, it is precisely Billingham’s personal traumatic experience (and arguably his continued post-traumatic suffering) that is somehow indirectly conveyed through this exposure of the suffering (through exposure to the otherness) of others. The first pulse of an indistinct connection sensed in 1994 during the Who’s Looking at the Family? exhibition comes to gestation in Billingham’s zoo project more than a decade later. Exploring different ways of appropriating (or, more accurately, identifying with) the zoo animal’s phenomenology (or sentience) in photographs and experimental videos taken in international urban zoos from 2004 to 2006, the artist motivates an indirect (involuntary, not entirely conscious)

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method of examining an autobiographical experience that has haunted him since he lived with his agoraphobic father in the council estate flat in the early 1990s. In video installations such as Polar Bear (2005), in which the animal incessantly shifts in and out of its ersatz den, the artist’s concern with the zoo as an environment of containment, is obvious: the sensation of confinement is intensified as the bear repeatedly disappears and reappears in the fixed frame of Billingham’s ‘static camera’ (Hansen 2007a). Again and again, the failed attempts of wild animals to adapt to their artificial habitats is re-enacted in these looped video films. But when exhibited in immersive juxtaposition in the gallery space, Billingham’s videos cumulatively express an obsessive interest in traumatic experience as viscerally expressed through the morbid repetitive behavioural instincts of the animals. And as the body of the spectator becomes enclosed in the ‘awful intimacy’25 of the dumbshow danse macabre of all this convulsive movement, this obsession becomes more and more violently manifest. What Billingham invites us to consider in Zoo is an image of trauma: a creature in an enclosed space reverting to meaningless psychotic behavioural patterns, doing nothing more than killing time in an instinctual re-enactment of the death-drive. With Zoo the artist invites us, that is, to consider a living being made absolutely marginal. And with this invitation the indistinct correlation between the quiet desperation of a man in his bedroom and the pictures taken by the apes in London Zoo is eventually clarified.

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6

HOME RECENT CINEMATIC WORK (2015–18)

Who’s Looking at the Family? (Revisited) In his recent cinematic work1 Billingham revisits the theme that secured his place in the genealogy of late twentieth-century British art. Yet, unlike the seminal family cycle that commenced with Triptych of Ray (1990), developed through Ray’s a Laugh (1996) and concluded with the home-movie videos Fishtank (1998), Liz Smoking (1998), Ray in Bed (1999) and Playstation (1999), his latest autobiographical project is a 16-mm feature film written and directed by the artist for which actors are employed to play his parents, uncle and younger brother. Ray & Liz is an anomaly: non-fictional and autobiographical, it cannot be described, on any level, as a documentary film. If Ray & Liz represents a thematic return, it signals an equally decisive departure. In contrast to other British artists of his generation who have made the successful transition to feature film – Sam Taylor-Johnson, Steve McQueen, Tracey Emin, Douglas Gordon – the cinematic turn arguably involves a more fundamental paradigm shift where Billingham is concerned. The unscripted circumstantial vérité synonymous with his post-documentary modus operandi is radically (and necessarily) readjusted to accommodate principles anathema to the intuitive, indecisive-moment spontaneity of Billingham’s signature working process. Systematic narrative techniques – dramatic development, plot structure, prescripted dialogue, as well as complete directorial control – assume supervenience in this latest phase of his (often unpredictable) practice (see Fig. 6.1). And perhaps the most disconcerting element for those familiar with the artist’s work is the casting of actors to play his family. Have we not, over the years, become accustomed to, even to a certain extent aligned ourselves with Billingham’s

FIGURE 6.1  Ray & Liz, directed by Richard Billingham, copyright Primitive Film and Luxbox, 2018, all rights reserved (still photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Billingham on set).

relatives? We are so used to seeing his family as distinct, extant individuals, made recognizably specific through their (appearance in his) photographs that the decision to engage actors has a somewhat disorienting, almost alienating effect on his cumulative work. However much the reconstitution of recognized (non-fictional) individuals (known by acquaintance from extensive documentary mediation) as characters may cause difficulties for some viewers, acceptance of the aesthetic validity of this latest project may require us to put our previous familiarity (perhaps even loyalty) with Billingham’s photographic realism in suspension. Indeed, given the extent of recognizability engendered by his photographic archive the decision to cast actors presented inevitable challenges.2 Unfortunate choices could prove not merely implausible but disastrous. ‘It was important,’ Billingham acknowledges, ‘that the actors looked and behaved like Ray and Liz’ (Adams 2016). In the film, the role of Billingham’s father is shared by Patrick Romer (Ray aged fiftynine [Fig. 6.2]) and Justin Salinger (Ray aged forty-nine [Fig. 6.3]) while his mother (aged forty) is interpreted, in a surprisingly convincing performance, by Deirdre Kelly (‘White Dee’ from Channel 4’s controversial documentary series Benefits Street3 and reality-TV show Celebrity Big Brother [Fig. 6.4]) with the younger Liz

FIGURE 6.2  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Ray [Patrick Romer]) (2018).

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FIGURE 6.3  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Ray [Justin Salinger]) (2018).

(aged thirty) enacted, equally vividly, by the relatively unknown professional Ella Smith (who won Best Actress award for the role at the Batumi International ArtHouse Film Festival in 2018). Obviously, the actors were auditioned and selected because of their physical and physiognomic similarity to Billingham’s parents. This is especially true of Romer and Kelly (originally cast for the thirty-minute pilot Ray [premiered 2015, officially released 2016])4 whose uncanny resemblance (and perhaps for once the overused adjective is accurate) to Ray and Liz contributes to a level of verisimilitude unusual in biopics.5 ‘You could say that matching an actor’s appearance is not as important as matching “energy” or the “inner life” of a character,’ Billingham adds, ‘but for this I thought both were important’.6 Ella Smith, even if she resembles Billingham’s mother slightly less than Kelly, is exceptional as Liz. Other notable performances include Richard Ashton as ‘Psychedelic’ Sid, the ageing hippy character who delivers Ray’s daily dispatch of homebrew, Tony Way as Ray’s naïve, childlike brother Lawrence (‘saft Lol’) and Sam Gittins as Uncle Lol’s sadistic nemesis William – a tattooed Black Country Sabbath-head with creepy James Dean overtones. Jacob Tuton plays Richard aged

FIGURE 6.4  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Liz [Deirdre Kelly]) (2018).

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ten, and Sam Plant portrays the artist as a young adult alongside Joshua MillardLloyd’s brilliantly natural performance as Billingham’s younger brother Jason (aged ten) – the inexpressive, dreamy child protagonist of the later sequences of the film. Arguably the most perplexing (and unanticipated) development of this latest phase of Billingham’s autobiographical project is the inclusion of a selfportrait. Two incarnations of the future artist (arrayed in patterned jumper, sandals and jeans as a child; in Doc Martens, school uniform and NHS glasses as a young adult) are directed through actors (Jacob Tuton and Sam Plant) that, consistent with the film’s overall impulse to verisimilitude and attention to detail, closely resemble the young Richard.7 And with these self-portraits Billingham provides, for the first time in his oeuvre, a revealingly self-reflexive insight into his developmental role within the family psychodrama. Less portraits in the conventional sense, however, Billingham’s ‘surrogate’ self-externalizations in Ray & Liz yet enable a significant departure from the over-intense subjective identification with the camera characteristic of his previous moving-image work. Facilitating a fundamental shift of optical perspective, this departure results in a crucial and, indeed, somewhat emancipatory – artistic and existential – latitude for the artist. Rather than the opportunist photographic stencilling of immediate experience as it happens in real time (the distinctive feature of his early postdocumentary family snapshots) the character of Richard in the film facilitates an unrestricted narrative vehicle through which a perhaps more indirect, even more nuanced and subtle, examination of the transposition of autobiographical content to screen is achieved. And clearly Daniel Landin (Director of Photography) assisted in the accomplishment of this transition. Landin, who previously worked with director Jonathan Glazer on Sexy Beast (2000) and, more recently, on his mind-bending meta-realist sci-fi noir Under the Skin (2013), brings his signature photogenic clarity and richness of detail to the cinematographic realization of Billingham’s photographic realism. Less intimate (and invasive) than the early photos and home-movie videos, Ray & Liz achieves a carefully mediated, if no less authentic and brutally honest, insight into the existential experiences that inform Billingham’s artistic (as well as personal) identity. The film is especially revealing regarding the origin of his instinct for realism. Yet, paradoxically, it is the film’s emphatic level of reflexive pictorialism that enables it to be read, on an intertextual level, as a genealogy of the screen son’s ‘compulsion to record his daily life’ (Lund 2018). Multiple references to his earlier photographic images are subtly incorporated into the continuum of the film (sometimes appearing as near still-life tableaux) to produce a self-referential substructure announced even in the promotional poster which features a still of Ella Smith curated to achieve a precise simulacrum of the absorptive jigsaw image from Ray’s a Laugh (#20, p.39) (Plate 7). This shot (Plate 33) – the first of two

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‘cutaway’ scenes showing Liz working on a puzzle – appears in the second of the memory sequences sutured into the film. With their youngest son Jason (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) wandering around Dudley Zoo ‘wagging it’ from school, we cut back to the apartment. As Liz tests a piece against the wildlife picture on the box, Smith’s almost identical fractal-patterned dress and attitude of concentration replicates the original composition. (The effect is an alienating reversal of the photograph’s objectivity whereby it seems as if this is the event captured in the [in fact chronologically later!] original snapshot.)8 A gold-coloured package of (Benson & Hedges) cigarettes and metallic ashtray lie within reach on the table as the exploratory camera slowly lenses the tableau. Set up on a mirror, the initial focus is on the inverted reflection of the mother’s face among the blur of scattered pieces. Then the focus changes to the fragmented mosaic on the mirror’s surface, in preparation for the camera’s gradual disclosive movement upward – to Smith’s (real, resolved) face as she sparks another cigarette. This is just one example of the rich ‘intratextuality’ present throughout Billingham’s film (there are, for instance, several shots of his leitmotif lace curtains and electric fire), a multi-layered metafictional effect is created where diegetic process is momentarily suspended in ephemeral tableau scenes intentionally constructed to perform a still photographic effect yet are themselves premeditated reconstructions of previous photographs. This is not to suggest that Billingham’s film presupposes acquaintance with his photographic oeuvre. Nevertheless, to a certain extent, this self-referential practice of cinematic ‘intratextuality’ generates distinct uncanny meta-referential effects across the film text, as the camera frequently shifts to draw attention to specific and ambiguously familiar details of the mise en scène. A pervasive sense of déjà vu, as a result, accompanies the viewing of this highly reflexive film: tableaux forensically reconstructed from archival photographic material constantly crystallize within the film, creating unsettling ripples of subliminal recognition across the ‘tissue’ of its signifying surface.

Figure in a room With Ray & Liz the artist returns home. And with this homecoming brings to closure a chapter in the existential interrogation of autobiographical modes of aesthetic inquiry that is woven, in patterns of escape and return, (from Ray’s a Laugh to Landscapes, to Zoo . . . and beyond); in this film, Billingham succeeds in realizing an alternative method of exploring the phenomenological tension between the objectifying lens and the externalization of lived experience (a tension he has struggled to resolve) and thereby achieves what could be regarded as the accomplishment of a project tentatively begun in the early 1990s.

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Indeed, Ray & Liz fulfils a process of ideation that had been incubating for nearly three decades. ‘I’ve had that idea for years,’ Billingham affirms: ‘I think I even had that idea when I was living with Ray’ (Billingham 2018). Inclined at the time to ‘objectify’ the experience of cohabiting with his reclusive father through aesthetic (specifically realist, painterly) discourse (see Chapter 1). Billingham has recently suggested that, had he had access to a movie camera in 1990, he would have attempted to document the ‘absurd’ situation in a series of cinematic fragments: ‘I’d have probably tried to make a film or series of sequences. Perhaps [even] something more complete’ (Billingham 2017b). Now – at least since the release of his feature film – he has become more definite about this, claiming that the movie ‘was already taking place in my head at that point’ (in Seymour 2018). More intriguing perhaps is the way in which this film confirms the preliminary status of the artist’s early photographic (and video) material. We know Billingham’s process is heuristic, instinctive and highly intuitive; yet, although he may have been uncertain about the ultimate direction of his aesthetic destiny during the long years of its gestation, one thing remained consistent: his determination that the early family studies were never intended as a fully realized or completely resolved project. Contrived as a means, these photos (he always insisted) were strictly ancillary to some indefinite, perhaps ultimately elusive objective; and as nothing materialized other than the increasingly significant preparatory work, this was often assumed to be a kind of procrastination-avoiding ‘pretext’ used by the artist to motivate his practice (Lingwood 1998b: 55). Now, however, the artist’s speculative comparisons of the 1990 Triptych to a series of ‘early film stills’, as well as his references to Ray’s a Laugh as a ‘visual play’, appear prophetic, verifying the self-fulfilling status of this latent development (in Lingwood 1998a: 54; 1998b: 55). Not that it is a priori necessary for an aesthetic aim to be realized in the lifetime of an artist (recall Bacon’s ‘Studies’) Billingham’s film nevertheless functions to latterly validate his claims to the research status of his work during the protracted period of its incubation (Cashell 2017). The film retrospectively establishes, at last, the precise nature of the nascent nature of Billingham’s most celebrated work; not only providing it with an empirical substrate, this documentary archive remains discernible yet subliminally active underneath the translucent 16-mm celluloid (much like the epochal layers of ripped wallpaper in the living room of his parents’ terraced house in the film). The surface of Ray & Liz, that is, leaks latent evidence of an extended, slow sedimentary process of visual research directed towards some future manifestation that, until this film (and Ray, the earlier pilot project),9 remained indeterminate. Structured like a palimpsest of stratified and cross-referenced historical layers under the film’s surface, the partially visible, ghostlike afterimages of Billingham’s photographs and videos flicker, creating a system of allusion and reference that has a retroactive effect on the perception of the early photographs. Although the Ray’s a Laugh photocycle is, by virtue of the film’s cinematic diegesis, provided

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with a certain causal anchorage, the way the 2018 film reanimates these suspended images with a new dynamic fission has a fascinating if slightly disorientating outcome. Never to be seen in quite the same light again, the early photobook now appears, retrospectively, a bit like the premature incarnation of an incompletely realized cinematic project. Filming took place on location in the enclosed bedroom space of the seventhfloor flat of Addenbrooke Court, the exact council estate in Cradley Heath where the Billingham family lived until his younger brother was taken into foster care in 1988 (at the age of eleven) and his mother moved out in 1990, leaving Richard behind with his father until he (Richard) went to Sunderland university two years later. The hermetic environment in which his father dwelt as an alcoholic recluse during this period is recreated for the film with forensic exactitude.10 ‘We used the photographs to reconstruct the wallpaper and the furniture. I wanted to go back to that, where every detail in the room is telling the story’ (in Adams 2016). Three images from Ray’s a Laugh provide specific points of departure: RAL #33 (pp. 60–1) (Plate 5) RAL #17 (p. 33) (Plate 1) and, most vividly perhaps, RAL #16 (pp. 30–1) (Plate 4). Referred to as research for production of this sequence’s mise en scène (as well as casting and wardrobe decisions) analysis of these photographs reveals that the nicotine-toned bedroom – complete with its ‘diapered’ wallpaper, semi-circular cream-coloured headboard, flocculent military-grey blankets and pillows, newspaper-strewn corners, battered tallboy, oval mirror, electric fire and shell ashtray with its smouldering cigarette butts – is an exact simulacrum of the space of his father’s living internment. Even its sunken inhabitant’s navy mock security-guard sweater with its elbow-and-shoulder fabric patches, and his moccasins, derive from this material. Monochrome (slightly earlier) photographs from this period (unpublished in Ray’s a Laugh) are also referenced in the film’s opening scene, including the 1990 Triptych (Fig. 1.1), as well as several images related to this early b/w sequence (i.e. Ray in bed, looking out the window, looking at himself in the mirror [Figs. 1.3, 1.4, 1.5], collapsed on the floor, warming himself by the electric fire, listening to the radio, etc.). ‘In the reconstructed room’, Billingham comments, ‘I was able to replicate with the 16mm [movie] camera these original positions or camera angles, from where I stood or crouched down, like another person watching him’ (Billingham 2017b).11 A sense of the limits of the space in which the events of the film take place is established from the outset.12 The film begins (before the titles appear) with the sound of rainfall – a soft noise of dripping, teeming and drumming, runoff splashing down from the gutters onto the pavement outside . . . distant thunder grumbling. Initial definition of the space is sketched in a series of close-ups of insects alighting on its various fixtures (a naked lightbulb, a key placed on the electric fire’s stained and singed surface, the nicotine-coated wallpaper, the lip of a glass, etc.). At the same time these diaphanous, semi-abstract shots – pulsing

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in and out of focus – serve to encode the transition from sleep to consciousness in spatial terms. For the moment, the figure on the bed, wrapped in blankets with his head sunk into the pillows, is sleeping.13 Then his eyes click open. Getting out of bed fully dressed, Ray positions himself, Artaud-like, on the edge of the bed in front of the dressing-table mirror. A close-up of his anxious, clicking, hands on his knees. He lights a cigarette-butt from the ashtray and extinguishes the match with a distinctive flipping of the wrist. As tendrils of smoke curl and disperse in little clouds around the cubicle-like space, the camera predatorially stalks every movement. Filling his glass, Ray lifts it, unsteadily, to his lips and, without finishing it, replaces the glass on the dresser and immediately refills it . . . to the brim. Again, the camera follows as he drinks more purposefully this time, tipping back his head to siphon the brown liquid in a single draught. A scarcely audible soundscape accompanies this solitary activity. All the sounds that reverberate through the thin walls of his room reach Ray homogenized into an ‘aural montage’, what Richard Dyer (with reference to the noisy soundtrack of crime thriller Seven [David Fincher 1995]) calls a ‘soft cacophony’ (Dyer 1999: 50). Echoing down the corridors and through the ventilation system of the housing block, a constant subsonic noise of muffled arguing, distant shouting, the faraway excited acapella of children playing in the streets, is mixed with the syncopation of footsteps in the corridors, hydraulic gurgling, the elevator’s desolate ascent-descent, the endless urban tinnitus of traffic, trains, sirens, pneumatic construction: conveying a compelling sense of the surrounding environment within which Ray has hollowed out his refuge, this off-screen acousmatic space signifies, in one vast enfolding negative reference, everything in the world from which this man has withdrawn. When the artist was living with his father in the early 1990s, as discussed in Chapter 1, the sombre atmosphere of Ray’s ascetic existence elicited specific thoughts of Walter Sickert’s images of Edwardian bedsit paralysis, inspiring the young art student to acquire his first camera as a practical means of distilling some elusive truth from his father’s hibernation. In conjunction with this stillrelevant underlying reference, the hermetic interior recreated (twenty-seven years later) in Ray & Liz now doubles, for the director, as an externalization of his father’s existential predicament. ‘I think of the room’, Billingham says, ‘as a visual manifestation of Ray’s inner life. A bit like the cell of a prisoner or even the pen of a zoo animal’ (Billingham 2017b). Motivated by the objective to understand his father’s predicament, the film amplifies what can only be implied in the photographs: when he awoke, Ray drank until he fell asleep, never left the flat and rarely even the bedroom. Apart from ‘Psychedelic’ Sid – who ‘kept an eye on him’, cashed his welfare cheque, paid his bills, made sure he had enough homebrew (dispatching containers of 10 per cent+ moonshine while Ray slept) – and Liz – who visited once a week – as well as his radio, Billingham’s father (voluntarily) lost all contact with the outside world.14 This

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needs to be conveyed economically in the film, and dialogue is used to accomplish this; for example, in one of the final scenes of the film, where Ray is visited by his estranged wife, Liz (Deirdre Kelly), she unsympathetically confronts her husband with his agoraphobic condition: ‘You never eat anything! You never go outside this block! In fact, you never even go outside this room. I’m surprised you even go toilet! [softer] . . . What sorta life’s that, Ray?’15 Because of his solipsistic drinking pattern Ray totally lost track of time: waking at noon, or three in the afternoon – or two in the morning – the cycle would begin again. ‘With some of the extended shots’, Billingham told me, ‘I wanted to give some impression of nonlinear sequential time . . . the time experienced by a prisoner or a zoo animal, because that is what it was like for Ray’ (Billingham 2017b). In this scene, the cinematic grammar invites the spectator to consider something that, like the zoo animal, is ‘rendered absolutely marginal’: a man in an enclosed space reverting to instinctual repetitive behaviour, a man killing time in involuntary enactment of the death-drive. Informed by his research for the Zoo series (see Chapter 5) the sensation of marginalization in this opening sequence is intensified by reconstructing the space as a cell for framing the human in such a manner that the compulsive behaviour of its specimen, made available for cinematic observation (or zoological perception), is rendered morbidly captivating. Inside, as the light fades in the window, and it palpably darkens in Ray’s room, this cues a slow right-to-left pan that incrementally discloses Ray’s sleeping form under the blankets – deep breathing (and snoring). This shot references RAL #33 (pp. 60–61) (Plate 5), characterized, idiosyncratically, by the artist as a ‘landscape’ (Fullerton 2016a). Sequenced with the previous shot of Ray at the window gazing across the bleak town in the fading light, this connection is suggested by the shape buried under the undulating peak-trough rhythm of his shale-textured blanket. The sudden cut that follows this montage is ambiguous: the train (we’ve heard previously) barrelling through the night. (All that can be seen of the midnight juggernaut however is a ghostlike trail of starlight.)16 In the morning, as Ray sleeps, Sid (Richard Ashton, long hair, beard, nosepiercing, and Ricky Tomlinson glasses) enters the room. ‘Ray?’ Flicking his hair back and bending over the sleeping form, he checks Ray’s breathing before placing three containers of homebrew on the dressing table. Removing the empties, he notices the Christian flyer propped up on the mirror (a portrait of the redeemer – with the legend ‘Jesus Loves You’ – over which Ray has scrawled S-I-D). He considers Ray’s message for a moment before jettisoning Jesus out the window: ‘Fuckin Bible bashers!’ And, with a final look at Ray, he exits. Time passes. Again, we see Ray in his customary position – on the bed facing the dressing-table mirror. Flicking the dregs from his glass into the corner, he pours a drink from one of the plastic containers. Taking care to fill the glass to the brim, he drinks, swallowing audibly. . . and drinks again. His drinking is methodical,

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autonomic and compulsive. Once the drained glass is placed back on the electric fire with a soft knock, it is immediately refilled. This demoralizingly repetitive (yet strangely hypnotic) activity is hyphenated by a sequence of extreme close-ups. Although not quite as disjunctive as Fishtank, the generally unobtrusive camera twitches into action at certain points as if undertaking an independent analysis of the scene. Detaching itself from passive diegetic recording, the stalking camera lens becomes an agency of sentient exploration, as it shifts to the tactile level in order to scrutinize the cutaneous creases and porous folds of Ray’s bristly skin. It moves in so close that it’s almost touching the trembly, juddering wattle of his neck as his throat contracts in a swallow. A dioramic re-enactment of a double spread from Ray’s a Laugh (#16 pp. 30–31) (Plate 4) this scene references (and reanimates) one of Billingham’s first colour photographs of his father sitting on the bed: in front of the mirror, adjacent to a stack of five slices of bread and a metal ashtray, a key comes into focus. Like a pointer indicating a pathway of perception in a Bacon triptych, everything in the picture seems out of focus except for this incongruous detail. A node of pictorial significance it seems less an identifiable instance of Roland Barthes’s photographic punctum (Barthes 2000: 27)17 than a spatial element placed to agitate the image’s depth of field: neither in the foreground nor background, the decentred key hovers around the middle ground of the pictorial field with hallucinatory clarity. Reviewing Ray’s a Laugh in 1997 Mark Sladen was perplexed by the placement of this esoteric motif: ‘The key is in such sharp focus,’ he comments, ‘that my eye is drawn towards it, and I find myself trying to read into it the possibility of escape from this microcosm’ (Sladen 1997: np). Although correct that this element influences the focal perception of the image, it’s necessary to observe that the key functioned to keep his father locked within his microcosm (Billingham 2018), shutting out the external world more securely. This detail does not symbolize the potentiality of escape as much as the anxious desire for sanctuary, and therefore the key, as motif, functions to accentuate the interiorized aspect of Ray’s predicament (admittedly another, perhaps negative, form of – internal – escape) (Fig. 6.5). The key was left in a prominent place on the mantel so Ray could locate it quickly (if required) when he was blind drunk (Billingham 2018).

FIGURE 6.5  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: key) (2018).

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Generating an atmosphere like Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’ (through a ‘grammar of the absurd’, composed of mise en scène, the contained [3:4] aspect ratio as well as the off-screen soundscape) Billingham’s enclosed figure-in-room construct, as in the theatre of the absurd, is carefully articulated to evoke the sensation of agoraphobia (not claustrophobia). In 1960, Pinter revealed to Kenneth Tynan that the characters in his plays18 fear what is ‘outside the room’. For, ‘Outside the room is a world’, he explained, ‘bearing upon them, which is frightening’ (in Rose 1993: 18; Cashell 2017). But Beckett remains enormously relevant for the opening sequence of Billingham’s film (Macnab 2018), especially apropos the stripped back existentialist trope of the solitary figure in a framed enclosure as explored in Krapp’s Last Tape.19 Identified by Beckett as a ‘wearish old man’, Krapp, confined to his den, is drinking reminiscing (on his birthday) and listening back to home-made diary recordings on a vintage reel-to-reel cassette-player. But perhaps even closer to Billingham is Beckett’s ‘piece for television’ Eh Joe (1967), especially the way the closed form of Eh Joe is given initial definition by the protagonist’s examination of his bedsit and his paranoid inspection of its fixtures. Consider, for instance, how the protagonist’s physical movements describe the enclosed space. The subsequent fixation on the expressionless, unemotional face of Joe, listening, paralysed, to his aural hallucinations, is depicted in terms that closely parallel Billingham’s distinctive camera practice. The face of Joe is compulsively ‘scrutiniz[ed]’ into disjunctive fragments by the ‘inquisitorial’ lens. Following the (relatively passive) pursuit of the figure around the space, once Beckett’s character sits on the bed, the camera suddenly becomes intentional, tracking around to dedicate itself ‘to an ever more intense scrutiny of Joe’s face, in ten basic movements, viewing it in larger and larger close up’ (Beckett in Fletcher & Fletcher 1978: 203). Billingham often refers, in this connection, to Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped (1956) which he saw on TV when very young (Billingham in O’Callaghan 2019).20 Similar to the prison cell scenario, where the restricted interior determines available shots and camera angles, the artist admits that the ‘intense rhythm’, impulse to authentic location and parsimony of Bresson’s cinematography, influenced the framing of the figure-in-room sequences of Ray & Liz. And although he acknowledges that this influence is accidental and may be largely unconscious, Pipolo’s observation about the ‘privileging’ of hands and face imagery in A Man Escaped (Pipolo 2010: 99) is a probable source for Billingham’s obsessive close-up scrutiny of his father’s elusive presence.

Episode 1: Lol Into this framing narrative, two antecedent autobiographic episodes are inscribed in loose chronological order. Initially discrete segments, these memory episodes

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were conceived as separate elements of a cinematic trilogy with the pilot short Ray (2015/6) developed as the first instalment of what Billingham still tends to refer to as a ‘triptych’ (Adams 2019). In the feature-length film, these episodes are integrated as analeptic (flashback) parables (stories-within-a-story) into the interior scenario, with the chronologically later Ray expanded and divided into three present-tense episodes in order to absorb the (past-tense) sequences. Using a technique of parallel editing, this Scheherazade-like encapsulation establishes a concentric narrative structure where past-tense episode is ultimately encircled within the scope of the overall narrative and a strong sense of background inertia is implied (as we return on two further occasions to the figure-in-room anchor). This impressionistic analogy derives from Wendy Everett’s discussion of the structure of Terence Davies’s autofictional film-diptych Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) (Everett 2004; 2005: 88); I refer to Davies in this context to suggest that the internal memory episodes inserted into Ray & Liz tend to disperse out in waves of emotional energy from the temporal gravity exerted by the static present-tense situation at its fulcrum. These episodes contain, as a result, strong structural implications of the isolated figure in the room haunted by intrusive interventions of eidetic memory. Evoked by a powerfully ‘emotional’ association with specific material catalysts (‘madeleines’) in the present, Ray’s memory intrusions have an oneiric, almost hallucinogenic energy that seems more intense than any straightforward ‘chronological’ or intentional episodes of narrative recovery (Everett 2005: 188). Describing the structure of Davies’s films as a concentric ‘pattern of timeless moments’ inset into a background that formally aspires to a condition of stillness, Everett says that the objective was to achieve ‘stasis as drama’ (1992: 74; Everett 2004: 70). Yet the concentric structure of Billingham’s film reverses the terms of Davies’s principle such that the past-tense episodes are conceived as radiating out from a node of narrative inertia, configured in terms of a dynamic of motion contained within a static construct (the figure’s movements circumscribed by the limits of the room). To suggest that Ray is haunted by intrusive memories, in other words, the framing narrative is structured utilizing a physical deprivation scenario analogous to Dennis Potter’s TV series The Singing Detective (Potter 1986) or, again, to Bresson’s A Man Escaped.21 In his room Ray is listening to the shipping forecast. It is evening now (tento-six according to the broadcast) and he’s looking out the window across the flat Black Country skyline (Plate 34). A close-up shot of his eye appears in profile at the left of frame as, outside the window, the last vestiges of daylight are squeezed into a thin pale-yellow layer under the great slab of the sky. This cuts to a semiabstract close-up of the gap between mildewed windowsill and hem of the lace curtain, until the camera steadies on a faded passport photo of a younger Ray and Liz propped up against the window frame. Contemplating the distant subjects, for a moment, set in the still-life aspic of lost time – in collar and tie and lightcoloured blazer, the man looks away slightly to the right (the scarcest intimation

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of what’s to come in the worried eyes) while his wife, in dark polo-neck sweater with necklace, her fringe cut high on her forehead, looks up at the lens and smiles – prompts a temporal transition as the image fades and is gradually transcended, in a slow (four-second / 96 frame) dissolve, by a long-shot across the townscape. Before this underlying scene has time to fully solidify however, a great translucent afterimage of Ray and Liz is momentarily embossed in the sky, before it too fades, metabolized by the clouds, into oblivion. Appearing at significant turning-points in the narrative the short, but significant, landscape sequences in Billingham’s film are motivated to cue a transition of tense (Plate 35). Specifically coded as Ray’s point of view, these landscapes are less direct ‘mental projections’ of a private ‘state of mind’ than cinematic combinations of ‘evocation and direct perception’ (Hockenhull 2014: 58; Beckett 1965: 75). Symptomatic of the shift of tenses (from present to past) taking place in Ray’s consciousness, such through-the-window scenes function as conduits to the memory sequences that take place immediately after them. If the view from the window enacts a topological transition (from inside to outside),22 the passport photo enacts the equivalent transition in temporal terms (i.e. from present to past) – the two transitional images intersecting precisely in the ‘zone of overlap’ of the shot dissolve. As the camera now scans the brooding Black Country hinterland from left to right, a movement directed towards the centre of the town, we enter Ray’s ‘psychological inscape’ (Esslin 1980: 84) as he gazes out (through the still disintegrating passport afterimage) across the landscape in the direction of his old house. A new establishing shot gradually appears: the façade of a red-brick endof-terrace house (number 34). It is circa 1980 just after Ray (a wiry, dark-haired Salinger in slacks and beige V-neck sweater) has been made redundant. And there’s a worried expression on his face (Plate 36). He’s supervising an infant – Jason (Callum Slater) – playing on the carpet in front of the electric fire, hammering coloured pegs into a wooden toy. As Ray grumblingly scrubs the soles of his sandaled feet against the floor to remove the dog-hairs embedded in the fractal-patterned carpet, a Dusty Springfield track (‘Some of Your Lovin’’) is playing on the radio somewhere in the off-screen interior. In blue cardigan and floral-print dress, Liz (Ella Smith) is sitting in her customary niche by the (net-curtained) window absorbed in an elaborate artificialflower arrangement. She lights a cigarette: ‘Where’s that tea, Ray?’ And, then, in a request-and-response exchange that recurs throughout the movie, the husband obsequiously delivers the mug of tea to her table. ‘Thanks, love.’ In this episode, gullible Uncle Lol – Ray’s brother (played by Tony Way) (Fig. 6.6) – becomes the victim of a cruel prank by William, the sadistic Sam Gittins (Night of the Hunter Love/Hate tattooed across his knuckles) lodging in the house, paying stolen rent to Liz. As the scene evolves, we see Ray in the front room restlessly

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FIGURE 6.6  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Lol) (2018).

hovering around the kitchen door (heating up a desiccated ‘pork-dinner’ for Lol) amid ambient domestic din – dog barking, radio warbling, kettle whistling – and hurt child crying (whom everybody, including his mother, ignores). Ray and Liz are preparing to take young Rich shopping for new shoes, and planning to leave the misfortunate (and incapable) Lol in charge of Jason (then two or three years old). But before she leaves, Liz (like a figure in a nightmare fairy tale) menaces Lol with a knuckle-duster fist, warning him (as he cowers under the shadow of its girth) not to go near their hidden stash of drink while they’re out: ‘I don’t want you touchin’ a drop of it,’ she threatens. ‘In fact, if you even think abaht lookin’ for it. [Slowly raises fist] You see this . . . .’ They leave (out the backdoor, past Tinsley metal dustbins, down the street). And, presently, Will arrives (ominously darkening the doorway in his motorcycle helmet, visor down: ‘It’s like the black hole of Calcutta in here!’) and intimidates Lol into deceiving Liz (the ‘Big Un’), tempting him to break into their stockpile of alcohol (the spoils of ‘Ray’s redundancy’) which Will has brought up from the cellar in a milk crate: ‘Whisky . . . gin . . . vodka . . . cherry brandy . . . Bet you’d like some o’ that? Wouldn’t yer. Yer cunt?’23 WILL: . . . There’s no way Ray – or Liz for that fucken matter – knows how much is in each bottle. . . . WILL: [Offering LOL a shot]:Get that down yer! LOL: Thank you. [He drinks]: Ooh . . . lovely, beautiful . . . like a sweet. WILL: Don’t fuck abaht! Knock it back! A kind of twisted tea-party scenario follows: Will gets Lol completely wasted (during which he bullies the devout Lol into blaspheming) and he ends up unconscious and regurgitating, face down on the carpet (to the ironic soundtrack of Siouxsie and Banshees’ ‘Happy House’ [1980]).24 Whereupon Will rifles through Lol’s pockets until he finds his wallet. And, weirdly, before leaving the scene, he rearranges Lol’s body on the sofa in the reclining attitude of Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton (1856) (one arm dangling down and the other delicately positioned

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over his chest [Plate 37]); he smashes the armrest to perfect the tableau and, before he leaves the scene, smears Jason’s face with shoe-polish. In an insane finale, he places the bread knife in the toddler’s hand. ‘Knife’, Jason innocently mouths, looking up at the serrated blade. Amid the chaos – toddler brandishing knife, Lol reclining grotesquely on couch, dog licking up vomit from carpet – the camera does a final survey of the shambles, focusing on the eyes of the tawdry portraits on the walls (Jesus curing the Blind Man, a ‘semi-nude’ reclining woman and an owl resembling Blake’s wide-eyed nightjar in Hecate [1795]), which suddenly, in the vicinity of the child, the dog and the (tea-wet) budgie squawking in its cage, become silent witnesses. Returning to the domestic bedlam, Liz loses it. She switches off the music and takes the blade from the child: ‘Put this knife in the kitchen, will you, before I FUCKEN USE IT ON ‘IM!’ (Fig. 6.7) she shrieks to her husband (tremblingly lighting a cigarette). Will returns to the scene (growling motorcycle outside announcing his arrival). Ray, meanwhile, hovering anxiously in the margins, passively observes as the inevitable unfolds around the Chatterton-like figure on the couch. ‘Put the kettle on, Ray.’ Closer in age to Liz than Ray,25 Will affects a deviously flirtatious innocence with her, encouraging her to ‘Bang ‘im one? ‘Ere, I’ll hold his head?’ Liz thumps Lol square in the face. After which, following a dramatic pause, a fat drop of blood trickles from his nose onto his cheek (accompanied by the kettle’s hysterical, highpitched whistle). Later, with Ray in the pub, Liz settles down with arachnid patience in her window recess, smoking and finishing her needlework (she’s embroidering heavy metal bands on Rich’s denim jacket). Presently Will comes downstairs to give her the rent (stolen earlier from Lol) before going out for the evening. She’s waiting until Lol’s sober enough to ‘feel it’. Then, carefully taking off one of her new shoes, she brutally bludgeons him, stopping halfway to turn the heel for maximum impact: Oh? Awake now are we? I come back ‘ere . . . [smack!] . . . To find you’ve drunk half our .  .  . [smack!] .  .  . spirits? [smack!] .  .  . Jason’s covered in polish? .  .  .

FIGURE 6.7  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Liz with knife) (2018).

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[smack!] and . . . [smack!] holding a fucken carving knife? [smack!]. You’ll never step foot in this [smack!] house again! [smack, smack, smack . . .] Concussed, Lol stumbles from the room without a word, and Liz, out of breath, screws her shoe back on, before turning to her son: ‘Make sure he’s gone, Rich.’ Unbeknownst to all involved however Will’s number on Lol was accidentally (and with folktale-like inevitability) captured on tape. When the family went shopping, a recorder belonging to Richard (Jacob Tuton) was left lying among the explosion of Lego on the floor where Jason was playing. Inadvertently pressing the RECORD (and PLAY) buttons, the infant taped the entire incident. Filmed in close-up during the exchange between Will and Lol, the vintage tape recorder’s timing dials are seen revolving mechanically: WILL: ‘You know Liz has got some o’ that Nazi in her, don’t you?’ Discovering this, Rich rewinds the cassette to play it back for his mother. She freezes, needle aloft in the air, listening (‘You know Liz has got some o’ that Nazi . . .’) and realizes she’s been deceived. Richard silently places the recorder on the chaos of half-completed jigsaws on the table. In the final scene we see skeins of brown magnetic ribbon fall in spirals, as Liz, sobbing, cigarette in mouth and eyes half-closed, blinking away the smoke (and the tears), mechanically unspools the tape from the cassette onto the carpet. Early in the episode, attention is drawn to the leitmotif tape recorder. During the opening scene when the ten-year-old Rich is at his Grandmother (played by Mary Helen Donald) Hilda’s house, he’s seen taping his Uncle Lol’s grotesque Quasimodo performance: ‘Water! . . . water . . . give me water! Esmerelda! The bells have made me deaf! The bells! The Bells! . . . etc.’ Lol exclaims: ‘Is that me? Is that my voice on there? It’s great what can be done nowadays, ennit!’ The subsequent event of accidental recording (including the dénouement when the tape is brought to his mother’s attention) reveals the genesis of Billingham’s forensic fascination with documentary realism. The artist still possesses a collection of (about twenty) audio recordings made during this period (which he was able to play to the actors) (in Lazic 2018c). Although the episode (in conjunction with the figure-in-the-room theatrical construct) clearly references Krapp’s Last Tape (which uses recording equipment to insinuate past absent selves into the dramatic space [Beckett 1986]) essentially, this episode (through the material symbol of the cassette recorder) dramatizes an origin narrative, providing a significant insight into the generation of the artist in his own medium.26 With a four-second dissolve, the episode concludes: from behind the shot of Liz unravelling the tape, a landscape gradually crystallizes (the now-familiar elevated panorama from the tower-block window); but before fading completely, Liz’s face remains for a moment etched against the heavy Autumnal sky. Moving back this

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time, the camera reverse-tracks across the almost-black, ink-blot land, from right to left. And, to the sound of gull-call on the wind, we return to the present. It is evening and Ray’s in his room. Silhouetted against the dying light in the rain-spattered window, he reasserts his place among net-webbed curtains, plastic bottle, dressing table, radio, oval mirror, electric fire – motifs arranged à la Walter Sickert in contre-jour composition. Suddenly, Ray jolts into action. Shoving the bottle aside and pushing the window open, he shouts, ‘Oi! Oi! Up ere!’ He’s spotted Liz (Deirdre Kelly) under umbrella, in the street below, on her way to the doctor and calls out to her from his eyrie: ‘What day is it?’ LIZ [aerial shot from Ray’s POV]: Tuesday. I’ll be up Thursday morning Ray! When he closes the window, the rainwater that has collected on it during this exchange splashes down on the pavement below. Time passes. Next morning, Sid enters the room. Finding Ray covered to the neck in a thin blanket, still as a corpse in its winding sheet: SID: Fucking flies. Ray wakes with a start. ‘I didn’t know you were there!’ When he gets out of bed, he immediately starts on Sid’s three-bottle deposit. ‘Spiders I don’t like.’ This cues a semi-comic choreography between the two men: Sid prowling around the space, hunting trapped flies with Ray’s drinking glass and discharging them out the window (while Ray, sitting on the bed, resorts to the measuring jug). The sequence that follows suggests the perspective of an unseen (or unnoticed) observer watching them from the doorway.27 Sid gives Ray his welfare money. RAY: I could go out on that! SID: Give it to the Big Un more like. RAY: She might have a shock this time. Why should I keep givin’ her me money, in the hope she’ll come back? SID: You do it every week Ray. RAY [slapping the mattress in a sudden burst of anger]: Well I’m not gonna keep bastard doin’ it! . . . He continues, more to himself than to his interlocutor: Sod ’er this time. . . . Dunno why she left though? [Drinks from jug]: Sod me I don’t. . . . I wonder what ’er flat’s like over there? Can’t hate her for it, see . . . I can’t hate her?

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During this sporadic dialogue, Ray focuses on a framed photograph of his younger son left on the bedroom wall when his wife moved out: ‘When I look at Jason up there? [cut to the photo (tie, school sweater)] ‘I keep thinkin’ that’s what 'e looks like now . . . Y’know, three- or a four-year old? . . . but that picture was taken years . . . Bastard years ago.’ It is darker when Sid leaves. Rain streams down the windowpane as night rapidly draws in. In the intensifying dark, the form on the bed is gradually delineated – in shades of indigo and black, to the sound of fireworks popping and sparkling in the cold skies over the town. Cut to Ray’s head in the pillows: awake, his eyes open in the dark, listening. A slow dissolve projects the nocturnal sky, lit up with a tiny blitz of starlight and fireworks, briefly onto his eroded face in the dark. Another transitional lap takes us from lonely heathscape to the ghostly image of a tower-block façade. Gradually gaining in distinctness, this diaphanous image crystallizes into the establishing shot of the next memory episode; and, as it fades in, it is complemented by an intricate clockwork tinkling of wind chimes and timpani superimposed over the ongoing background drone of the off-screen acousmatic space (children playing, traffic and trains, birds twittering, dogs barking, distant sirens skirling in the evening wind): Jason’s motif.

Episode 2: Jason The second memory episode takes place seven years later and concerns Jason’s disappearance from home (at the age of nine or ten) and subsequent discovery, in a hypothermic state, in the garden shed neighbouring a friend’s house. Following the establishing shot,28 Jason (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) is discovered dropping small objects from the seventh-floor window onto the pavement below. One of Liz’s china figurines narrowly misses a pedestrian (a cameo appearance by Jason Billingham!) who shouts up at the little shadow hiding behind the net curtains.29 ‘OI!’ It is early, and the boy is up playing with the uncaged rabbits (among their shit) on the couch. He goes to the kitchen to make himself a crude sandwich of pickled red-cabbage poked out from a sweet-jar under the sink. Returning with his snack to the living room (fake-flower-arrangements, ceramic ornaments and dolls adorning every surface), he sits on the floor, very close to the TV, watching a wildlife programme. Touching the flickering screen, he looks into a panther-cub’s cold, green eyes. His parents are still in bed. And a quick survey of their bedroom establishes that this is the same room in which his father is (at present) interned. Ray and Liz, for the moment, are asleep, their Doberman curled up on the yellow blanket between them (Plate 38). Jason shares a room with his scholarly older brother Richard (Sam Plant) now seen sitting on his bed studying, while Jason inspects

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the live snails in the Tupperware container concealed under his bed. Mail comes through the letterbox which prompts the dog to spring off the parents’ bed; this is followed by a close-up of the animal’s feet as it urinates on the letter (addressed to the ‘Parents of Jason Billingham / Flat 72 / Addenbrooke Court etc.’). In the next scene, Jason is foraging in his parents’ bedroom. A crazy bricolage of objects (cosmetics, medicines, blister-pack pharmaceuticals, candles, hygiene sprays and creams, cups, chipped china ornaments, dolls, stacks of jigsaw puzzles, vintage board-games) covers every available surface, from dressing table to windowsill, spilling off the chair onto the carpet. Standing at the dressing table, Jason dextrously removes money from his mother’s purse and replaces the purse silently among the debris (reflected in the oval mirror his father will spend his future days looking into while drinking). His parents sleep on through these explorations – Ray with his head thrown back, mouth wide open, and Liz turned away on her side (Plate 38). Now the child (consistent with his nascent curiosity in gravity) dangles a hairclip precariously over his father’s mouth. But before it has a chance to fall from his fingertips, Richard (observing this behaviour through the half-open door) intervenes with a quiet call. ‘Jason.’ Rich has a better plan. Under his older brother’s supervision, Jason tips a loaded tablespoon of chillipowder into his sleeping father’s mouth. Pause. One cough and a plume of red dust is ejected into the air. Ray splutters awake in asphyxiated panic. A shortlived chaos ensues (barking, shouting, loud cursing, small-feet scattering) as Ray sprints to the kitchen, in pants and socks, to rinse his mouth under the gushing tap, following which, walking down the narrow hallway to close the front door (which Jason, in his getaway, has forgotten to shut) he steps into the puddle of dog-piss; and, looking down, sees the letter. Pouring the liquid off the envelope into the (dish-filled) kitchen sink, he folds the letter in half and, without opening it, stuffs it in a drawer. Outside, Jason is loitering by the stream near the industrial wastepipe when a group of children in school uniform pass by. Yet he remains where he is (inspecting a new snail). One of them looks back from the path. ‘We’re having a bonfire tonight. You should come.’ Sometime later, Jason is seen in panoramic long shot, taking the chairlift to Dudley Zoo. The image of the solitary child wandering among the animal enclosures in the subsequent scenes invokes Billingham’s Zoo. In this lyrical (and almost silent) sequence, the empty wintertime zoo represents more than a zone for killing time; it offers a relatable space to the child, as the animals contained in their cold houses seem bored, restless, longing to be free, yet somehow craving the protective schedule of the institution. Entering this structured environment to pass the expanded hours of truancy, Jason pauses at the edgy African wild dogs pacing behind their fencing, watches the keeper tossing dead fish to the seals. Inside the winter giraffe-house, he feeds bamboo shoots to the animals through the wire mesh and this quiet almost elegiac scene elucidates

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the way the earlier Zoo project alludes to childhood. As the giraffe bends down and gently takes the offered shoots, a moment of silent communication takes place between child and animal (Jason’s head is framed by the great spotted legs behind the wire mesh) suggesting a relational perspective where the animal momentarily emerges from invisibility. The scenes in this part of the movie strongly recall Ken Loach’s film Kes (1969) (based on Barry Hines’s 1968 novella A Kestrel for a Knave) where, before school, the child protagonist, Billy Caspar (Dai Bradley) heads into the misty fields behind the terraces to train his captive hawk. Back in the flat, his parents are drinking with a neighbour in the kitchen: Liz contacting other bored people on her CB radio, Ray looking briefly through the sliding partition into the living room where Rich is sitting on the carpet bathing his feet in a basin of water. The schlock Stephen King horror movie Children of the Corn (Kiersch 1984)30 is on television (scenes of kids hiding in the cornfield, wizened plants silhouetted against the summer sky). An unfocused shallow depthof-field close-up of a cigarette-end smouldering in an ashtray (with an inch of ash) pulls back to reveal Liz seated in a semi-trance beside the fridge, smoking, drinking tea, stroking the dog at her feet. Again, the camera compulsively stalks the mug to her mouth while Ray stands at the kitchen window, drinking. The camera responds to the sound of a door opening as Jason (in muddy uniform shirt) returns home. Ignoring his parents, he traverses the kitchen space between them and mechanically fetches the bell-jar of cabbage from under the sink. He begins to smear a slice of bread with the purple mulch. ‘Good day at school Jay? . . . anyone’d think they didn’t feed you at school?’ As Jason exits the kitchen with the sandwich in his mouth to join his brother in the living room, his mother looks, lingeringly, after him. Mesmerized by the scary imagery on screen (sacrificial dagger held up into the azure sky, screaming, blood-splatter on ears of corn, etc.) Jason sits beside Richard on the carpet in front of the television. Pulling on his docs, Rich is preparing to visit Uncle Lol, leaving Jason to watch the horror alone. The screen suddenly goes black and the electric fire goes cold as the power in the flat cuts out. ‘Have you got change left for meter?’ Ray is heard asking in the interior. ‘No’, his wife answers, ‘Not if you want me to phone “Boris” later.’ ‘That bastard.’ Now Jason is alone in the darkening living room; his mother is putting on her overcoat. Cut to fire: dead. And pulling on a ragged castoff jumper over his shirt, the boy silently exits the flat. Back in the kitchen, Ray continues drinking and smoking in the noirish glow of an oil-lamp. He surveys the town from the kitchen window as night draws in and is briefly seen from the other side of the window, a blurred double-vision apparition, grimly observing his wife’s trip to the telephone kiosk. This scene precedes a long shot of the hillside cemetery (invoking the graveyard nocturama from the Black Country series [Untitled #7 2003] [Plate 20]) into which, now, a

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little figure in an oversize sweater and ragged jeans enters, wandering alone among the crepuscular tombstones. Against the skyline, the monolithic tower blocks, their spines lit-up, look spectral in the twilight. A low funeral bell begins to toll as Jason approaches through the shadows of the skeletal trees. Spooked, he breaks into a run which, in turn, cues an eerie, faraway howling. Meanwhile, back in the darkened flat, Liz is arguing with her husband (shadowing the hallway with his Dickensian lamp) about their failure to recoup the money from the sale of their Sidaway St house to ‘Boris:’ ‘Why don’t you bastard go and phone then, eh?’ she asks. ‘Oh yeah. You dunno how to use a bloody phone, do you?’ and so on. Cut to Ray in the kitchen, refilling his glass. A tableau of his figure framed in the window looking westward over the town with the sky reflected on the external surface (fireworks sparkling among the great banks of cloud) brings the scene to a close. It is darker when Jason enters his friend Tony’s backyard to join a bunch of local kids gathered around a bonfire. It’s Guy Fawkes night. Fireworks pop and sparkle in the indigo skies. ‘D’you want some toast, Jay?’ The soundtrack ‘Pass the Dutchie’ by British-Jamaican band Musical Youth (1982) plays over a montage of cuts that takes the opportunity to survey the characters in their separate ‘present’ locations (Ray’s double-vision face in the frosted kitchen window, Rich asleep on the couch at Lol’s, his textbooks scattered around him). Jason looks up, hypnotized by the fireworks display overhead. When the deceptively upbeat song concludes (‘How does it feel when ya got no food?’) the kids are called back inside. Jason recognizes that it’s time to leave: ‘Seeya, Jay. Watch how you go.’ In the deserted night-time backstreets of Cradley Heath, the boy is lost. Stopping at the kerb, he looks frightenedly left and right, and hesitates before crossing the street. He walks along the eerily empty road dwarfed by the high railings that mark the perimeters of windowless industrial buildings. He jumps over black puddles in the asphalt. It seems even darker as the small figure, more rapidly now, passes under twenty-foot high red-brick walls alive with a macabre skiagraphy of windblown urban foliage (compare Black Country Untitled [Night] #10, 2003). Wraithlike shadows dance all around him. A bottle rolling along the gutter makes him freeze with fear. As he enters the dead zone of Cradley Heath, the child is totally terrified. Weird sounds drift from hidden alleyways: distant banshee-like screams, other voices calling and shouting, branches groaning in the wind, a werewolf ’s howl. A long shot brings the corner, as before, into frame, and Jason turns and walks quickly back the way he came, past pavement trees and looming lampposts swaying slightly in the night breeze. Shadows seem to creep with sinister intentionality. He breaks into a panicked run. Returning to Tony’s back garden (now deserted, the bonfire extinguished) Jason crawls through the sacking in the door of a neighbour’s shed. Deep rumbling in the distant skies, rainfall. Petrified, he fashions a makeshift niche for himself in the dark among the garden junk and, at length, falls asleep (Fig. 6.8).

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FIGURE 6.8  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Jason in shed) (2018).

Back in the flat, Ray is at the hob heating a saucepan of milk. Boiling froth briefly appears over the black lip of the pot before he pours it into a glass mug on the counter. He delivers the milk to Liz (the camera lens magnetized to the mug) sitting in the lamplight completing another jigsaw. A high-angle shot invokes (for the second time) the famous image in Ray’s a Laugh. Started at the corners, on this occasion, her puzzle is set up on a kitsch picture of a weeping child with sympathetically large eyes, partially visible among the mosaic of puzzle-pieces (invoking the ‘curse’ of the Crying Child). The focus changes as Ray’s hand enters the shot to deposit the mug on the table beside her. ‘Thanks love.’ Next morning Jason is discovered hypothermic and temporarily unresponsive. Blurred POV shapes appear in peripheral vision: ‘Can you hear us? .  .  . He’s freezing . . . Stone cold.’ They pass the boy’s limp body over the fence (depositionstyle) into the arms of Tony’s mother and he’s taken into the house and wrapped in blankets. Tony appears: ‘I thought you went home last night Jay?’ And as he gradually recovers (‘I’ll be alright in a minute’) he tells them that he forgot his way home. Asking if he can stay the night, Tony’s mother replies on condition that he has the permission of his parents, ‘And you don’t have to sleep in no shed this time’. Jason returns to the flats but tells his sleeping parents nothing before leaving again. (‘Did you tell your mother?’ ‘Yeah, it’s all fine’ ‘Great!’.) It is suggested, in the meantime, that Tony’s mum has contacted the school and possibly informed Social Services about the incident. Later, when she’s showing their visitor his room for the night, Jason glances at the made bed, turns and involuntarily embraces her. Overcome with emotion she returns his hug. The next day, in the park, Jason bumps into his parents wheeling a 1960s-style funereal pram with a rabbit inside! ‘New clothes? Where you been? Coppers have been looking for you.’ JASON: The police? LIZ: Aye JASON: I’ve a chicken dinner being cooked for me. I’ll be back after. LIZ: Make sure you do. School tomorrow.

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The next scene is set in the smoky school-principal’s office where (amid some interrogative displaying from the head teacher: ‘Do you realize you could’ve been frozen to death? Sleeping rough all night in a shed. Weren’t you scared?’) a social services official informs Jason that he shall be taken into foster care immediately: When you leave school today, I’m going to take you to a new home. A home with foster parents who are going to look after you. They’re gonna give you nice clean clothes. You’re gonna get all the meals you need; and they’re gonna make sure you come to school on time. It’s only temporary. . . . How d’you feel about that? JASON: Yeah. It’s all fine. Again, the windchime-phrasing of Jason’s motif ascends in the soundtrack (with the slightest frisson of unease) as the penultimate scene takes shape. Cut to the council flat where the social care professional is informing the Billingham parents of recent developments, ‘we can’t have children Jason’s age sleeping rough.’ But that doesn’t mean that his biological parents can’t visit him (with his guardians’ consent). As he leaves, the social worker notices Richard sitting alone in his bedroom. He stops at his door: ‘Suppose you heard all that?’ RICHARD: Can I be put with foster parents too? SOCIAL WORKER: No. It’s Jason we’re most concerned with at the moment, so . . . You’re nearly an adult. You’ll be getting out of here soon. So, you just focus on that. OK? RICHARD: [No response. Looks to left of frame and then down] Cut to mother in the kitchen, visibly upset, but silent, insensate. She puts her hand to her mouth and, reflecting the end of the first memory episode, fights back the tears. With the sound of his fish tank bubbling in the background, Ray’s comforting arm comes into frame (at right) and he says something fatuous. But the camera holds on Liz’s face, fascinated, searching for traces of emotion. Looking out of frame, at nothing, she shrugs her husband’s hand off her shoulder. ‘Pass me a fag, Ray.’ She wipes her mouth, coldly, again. ‘Thanks love.’ A reverse tracking shot down the narrow hallway pulls us back from Ray and Liz’s flat (and out of the memory episode) as the façade of the tower block reappears diaphanously on screen. Slowly breaking the hallucinatory spell, the reverse tracking continues till a slow dissolve gradually establishes a low-horizon shot panning over the Black Country (as before: bloated smoke-like clouds, turbulent, heavy atmosphere, pale diffuse light, gulls) with the disappearing tower block still visible for a moment, layered behind it. An extreme close-up of a fly alighting on a bottle neck fizzes into focus and, as the penultimate scene unfolds, we’re back in the dead environment of Ray’s bedroom once more.

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At the end of the movie, Ray’s room is transformed into a camera obscura. A rhomb of flickering evening light appears on the far wall, the projection of the window in the setting sun, its inhabitant’s distinctive aquiline profile cast in shadow within the embers of that aperture (based on the shadow in RAL #8, pp. 14–15). With his head shrouded under the net curtain’s veil, Ray lights a final cigarette (we hear the dry scrape of the matchbox) cupping his hands around the glowing splint. A train clatters by and, as if in response, the sky goes bloodred in preparation for the final scene, where, alone in his room, Ray becomes progressively immersed in the deepening glow of the electric fire, drinking and listening to his radio. He lip-synchs (involuntarily) to the Dusty Springfield track on the radio (‘Some of Your Lovin’’ reiterated from the first episode) till he’s completely saturated in the intensifying uterine radiance (red filters were employed to achieve a more immersive impression of the weaker ambient electric firelight [Billingham 2018]). As the song gradually detaches from its source of transmission, it seems to fill the space in sympathy with the deepening colour; and Ray, in response, becomes emotional at the private memories elicited by the music. As the passport photo of Billingham’s parents once again floats into view on screen, we leave the character to dwell forever on his entire life. With the stasis of the main theme re-established, it is as if a veil of perception has been removed, and a thin and palpable presence briefly revealed behind it (Plate 39). Transient. Still. And there.

Conclusion: How it was The memory episodes in Ray & Liz generate the impression of the solitary figure in the bedroom beset by intrusive memories. Yet this way of parsing the plot, although supported by the cinematic syntax, is problematized by the protagonist’s relative lack of participation in (and even complete absence from) the events depicted, raising questions about the source of the memories. Whose memories are these? Are they memories that haunt the artist? Memories of the son revisited on the father? In the final scene of the film, as the red ambience of the electric fire intensifies in the bedroom, the spectator is, revealingly, excluded from accessing whatever memories are haunting the protagonist at the end (yet, admittedly, a recursive structure is suggested through the repetition of the Dusty Springfield song – that it’s the same memories over and over again). Recognizing this incongruity, Carson Lund (in a review of the film) inquires whether the memory sequences in the film represent ‘incident[s] that Billingham needs to exorcise’ (Lund 2018). And, of course, it’s obvious, on one level, that they are – and perhaps, to that extent, irreducibly – the artist-director’s hauntological memories: clearly it is Richard who’s been affected by these events. There is the additional question of the director’s implied agency, and even, I would argue, as in Fishtank, his implied presence in the interior sequences: ‘I am there, anyway,’ he cryptically said in a recent interview (in Adams 2019).

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And, the entire film, as established, is a mnemonic reconstruction from the artist’s photographic substrate. Yet, curiously, it is also important to observe that Jason (although still an infant and thus unable to testify) is the only character who witnessed (and, indeed, recorded) the incidents reconstructed in the first memory episode (Richard, remember, has gone out with his parents) and, of course, the focalization in the second episode shifts exclusively to Jason, to narrate his absence from home in semi-restricted mode, strongly implying that this is the director’s revisualization of his young brother’s experience, an attempt, that is, to reimagine Jason’s night terror from his own perspective – and, in the process, achieve some retrospective phenomenological understanding of what he endured. A reconstruction from Jason’s subsequent testimony (and information Billingham discovered in the aftermath [Adams 2019]) this episode involves a crucial shift in focus and point of view. Recognizing this, Tim Adams suggested to the artist that the film represents a ‘fraternal love letter’ (Adams 2019). ‘Was a misplaced guilt at not having done more for his brother one of the motivations for needing to explain that past to himself again?’ Billingham smiles at the suggestion. Well, I had to look after myself I suppose . . . And it’s the parents’ job isn’t it, to look after the little one? (BILLINGHAM in ADAMS 2019)

The issue here is that the memory sequences in Ray & Liz, although sutured into the film to suggest they are remembered by the father, represent, in fact, Jason’s experience empathetically reconstructed thirty years later by his brother (and, indeed, that is how the screenplay was originally conceived) (Adams 2019).31 A key scene, in this regard, is the scene where the parents are drinking in the kitchen and their son (returning home starving from his day of truancy) quietly enters the space among them. Ray and neighbour (standing at the window) comment on Jason’s doglike appetite; and Liz (from her chair by the fridge) enquires about his day. Earlier, Ray looked in on Rich through the frosted-glass partition while watching TV. Now Jason joins his brother in the living room and, following the power-cut in the flat, slips out unnoticed and disappears into the dusk. We are left with a double-vision shot of the father framed by the kitchen window, gazing out over the darkening town, a premonition of his future condition. Already, by this stage, a powerful alignment has been established with Joshua Millard-Lloyd’s character; but unlike, say, the six-year-old Michelle in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, the spectator is in no doubt that Jason is the protagonist of (this episode of) Billingham’s film (even if the focalization shifts through the various episodes and ultimately perhaps remains ambiguous). Yet, through these shifts of focalization, a prevailing characteristic of the contemporary realist film text is clarified, for, according to Samantha Lay, with the refocus on the personal in the neorealist drama (as epitomized by 1990s British films’ preoccupation with the

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so-called ‘dysfunctional’ family), ‘a new representational emphasis can be discerned in the portrayal of, and centring on, the children of the working class’ (as perfected, for example, in Shane Meadows’s This Is England [2007]) (Lay 2002: 107).32 Although admitting that, technically, this is not a new phenomenon (as Kes [Loach 1969] could be regarded as a paradigm instance), she continues: In line with the extensionist urge of realism, contemporary British social realist texts have increasingly not only incorporated the experiences of working class children into their narratives, but have also made them the central protagonists. (LAY 2002: 109)

As suggested in Chapter 2, concern for Billingham’s younger brother was arguably one of the motivating impulses behind the publication of Ray’s a Laugh in 1996. Ray & Liz revisits that motivation in a medium that not only provides greater scope for expository content but has the potential to convey past experience through evoking memory (as discussed), enabling more effective empathy with the child protagonist. Using the capacity of the moving image to enact past experience through ‘re-membering’ different tenses into the present-tense narrative level, that is, more scope is available for Billingham to suggest something closer to the actual process of memory than possible in photobook form. Consistent with the artist’s intention (in his own words) to ‘provide a backstory for the photographs’ (Seymour 2018) this early fraternal concern (and perhaps latent guilt) is finally accomplished – and given narrative closure in the film: but, because remediated through his own memories (and photos), ultimately represents his own traumatic experience empathetically externalized through the relational vehicle of another’s experience. Recall the artist’s brief declaration on the dustcover of Ray’s a Laugh referring to his brother’s being ‘taken into care when he was 11.’ Since it provided only the most minimal content, this photobook blurb left the story crucially underarticulated, yet it did inform the reader that his brother had returned to his biological parents and recently himself become a father. Initial tape-andphotocopied draft samples of Ray’s a Laugh (which I viewed) incorporate official Child Protection documentation relating to his brother’s case as collaged material content. (It could even have been the pissed-on letter that we see coming through the letterbox in Ray & Liz.) Yet this archive material was edited out of the final draft of the photobook, Billingham told me, because it was considered to overstate the theme, was regarded by the editors as ‘trying too hard to tell [Jason’s] story’ (2018). Anyway: here, thirty years later, is Jason’s story now vividly reconstructed on film. When Billingham showed the movie to his brother, apparently, he just said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly how it was.’33

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CONCLUSION LOCATING BILLINGHAM IN THE CONTEXT OF BRITISH NEOREALISM: MEMORY REALISM AND THE PATERNAL GAZE

Since premiere screenings of Ray & Liz in international film festivals critics have remarked the influence of Terence Davies on Billingham’s filmmaking (Bayman 2019; Benbow 2019; Bradshaw 2018; Gilbey 2019; Green 2019; Hunter 2018; Lazic 2018b; Lund 2018; Mcnab 2018; O’Callaghan 2019; Peranson 2018; Rose 2019). Admittedly more prominent in Fishtank (1998) than the later feature, the impact of Davies’s singular non-mainstream cinematic style on Ray & Liz, if subtler, is significant; and, even if the experimental Nouvelle Vague–style camera practice is finessed in the film to cohere more seamlessly with linear narrative exposition, at several key moments in the plot, as observed, the camera interrupts diegetic transparency to focus on the offline supplementary details of a scene. These semistill ‘cutaway’ shots aspire to the intercalation of pictorial (still-life or landscape) tableaux vivants into the filmic diegesis and often (but not exclusively) represent ‘intratextual’ allusions to specific images from Billingham’s previous work (Ray’s a Laugh and Black Country) as well as from very early unpublished archive photographs of his parents, his uncle and his hometown. (There are also key, if more oblique, references to his rural landscapes and to the videos of Zoo.) What Billingham acquires from Terence Davies, this concluding section will establish, is the ability to motivate a duality of cinematic form which makes Ray & Liz an achievement of realism, but of a specific kind that involves an essential, if subtle, stereoscopic level of aesthetic formalism to actualize. Just as identification

of Davies’s films as ‘social realism’ necessarily entails recognition of their high level of formal and aesthetic sophistication, it is crucial to acknowledge the richly reflexive structure of Billingham’s photographic realism. The realism of Ray & Liz, although at times severe, I argue, is inextricable from its subtle and complex aesthetic aspects even if, as Wendy Everett observes of Davies, such ‘self-conscious’ aspects are typically (if myopically) regarded by critics as anathema to an ‘authentic’ realist motivation.

From memory realism . . . Notwithstanding their eidetic ‘mimetic realism’, the films that comprise Davies’s celebrated early autofictional Trilogy (1976–83) cannot be identified with conventional naturalism in any unproblematic sense: clearly, we are not dealing with ‘documentary-style verisimilitude’ here.1 Rather, Davies’s film, a cinematic triptych stylistically influenced by the austere, absorptive clarity of Dutch genre compositions more than by the British New Wave or Documentary Movement, is informed by a lifelong fascination with the esoteric theory of time in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Davies 2010; Everett 2004: 37–8). The erudite doctrine of the simultaneity of the past and the present in Eliot’s poem-cycle profoundly shapes Davies’s understanding of the affinities between the time-based moving image and the phenomenology of human memory (Eliot 1944). In her monograph on Davies, Wendy Everett claims that, although his films satisfy many of the defining criteria of the (Griersonian) documentary realist paradigm (e.g. site-specific location, social content, working-class environment, the vernacular authenticity of relatively unknown [or non-professional] actors, unobtrusive camera techniques, etc.) a film such as (his masterpiece) Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies 1988) simultaneously functions ‘on a highly stylistic level’, with typically antirealist features, such as haunting lyrical ‘tableaulike compositions’, elaborate, aesthetically motivated shots and creative cinematography, implemented to accentuate psychological effects such as the ‘physical and emotional entrapment’ of characters, combined with a paranoid fidelity to period accuracy (Everett 2005: 189). Yet, as Tony Williams observes, this ‘self-conscious’ level of aesthetic sophistication does nothing to diminish the film’s sociopolitical content (Williams 2006: 245). Indeed, with Davies, Everett argues, it is as impossible to separate ‘form’ from ‘meaning’ as it is pointless to draw a clear distinction between his films’ social content and their ‘self-conscious formalism’ (2005: 190). She goes on to insist that Distant Voices, Still Lives is, irreducibly, ‘both social document and aesthetic composition’, and represents one of the few effective unifications of ‘the British documentary and the European auteur traditions’ in cinema history (2005: 189). Everett clearly adores the film: Distant Voices, Still Lives, she concludes, ‘weaves its meanings through its shifting

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tones and harmonies, its rhythmic contrasts, and its intervals and silences as much as through its haunting images’ (2005: 194–5). If Davies’s cinematic style is the result of concentrated effort to externalize ‘subjective’ and ‘personal’ experience on film, as Everett suggests, this is a function of his profound understanding of the medium’s affinities with memory. The director is especially good at motivating the ‘perceived present-tense’ of film to realize the experience of the past (2004: 46): ‘The nature of memory’ Davies, following Eliot, maintains ‘exists in a single moment. The recalled past is always contemporary’ (in Jarman 1994: 1). The semantic capacity of film to sequence analeptic, non-consecutive structures together – the method of literally ‘remembering’ by suturing different tenses and temporalities into the present-tense frame of reference – emulates the cognitive process of human memory, making film an ‘ideal form for the creation of autobiographical discourse’ (Everett 2004: 75). Using film to intersperse past into present, indeed, it is possible to actualize the experience of remembering on screen. Billingham’s complementary attempt to enact the phenomenology of memory in Ray & Liz – through, it should be acknowledged, many of the techniques identified with Davies’s style (attention to detail, formalist concern with texture and colour, intricacy of structure) – represents an equivalent (if individually distinct) form of Daviesian ‘memory realism’. The artist’s endeavour to evoke memory on celluloid is motivated by a parallel commitment to conjuring (what Elena Lazic has called) the ‘haptic’ palpability of perceptual experience. When asked about this technique, Billingham confirmed that the low angles, lighting and depth of field in the film were intentionally manipulated to emphasize the tactile qualities of perception suggestive of a child’s visual hypersensitivity to discoverable reality: ‘When you think about your memories as a kid’, the artist explains, ‘things do appear in close up because you look at things really close up, like this wire or plug socket. Or you feel the texture of things. You put your face really close to the carpet; you want to feel what the carpet’s like’ (Billingham in Lazic 2018b; Gilbey 2019; Adams 2019). Characterizing his ‘memory realism’ (2010: 37) in typically pragmatic terms, interestingly, Davies claimed that his methodology was determined by the modest attempt to render ‘a child’s eye vision of the world’ (in Everett 2004: 25). ‘You perceive something,’ he comments, ‘and you try to make the record as close to the memory experience as you can, to capture the same intensity’ (in Everett 2004: 37). But, for the director, transposing the thaumaturgic tonalities of childhood experience to screen results in something more existentially rewarding than anything achievable by the efficient reconstruction of the factual event as it ‘actually happened’ (Davies 2010: 37). Repeatedly distinguishing between the literal (‘photographic’) memory and its emotional content, Davies insists, in fact, on the emotional association as a more intimate and powerfully eidetic (yet also perhaps more elusive) agent of evocation than the (voluntary) narrative recollection of past experience (in Jenkins and Bragg 1992). Indeed, Davies often quips that he does

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not possess a photographic memory but, has rather, a photo-emotional memory, and it is this emotional structure that he endeavours to evoke in film. Distant Voices, Still Lives, like Ray & Liz, begins with the sound of thunder and a radio-voice announcing the shipping forecast.2 As the camera settles, through a veil of teeming rain, on the red-brick façade of a terraced house, this sets the scene for multiple elements of strong comparative correspondence between the two films, including, inter alia, motifs like the net curtains, the rain-streaming window panes, the hallway tracking shots, and, of course, the 96-frame lap transition between tenses (discussed in the analysis of Billingham’s film above).3 Yet despite its evocative, almost elegiac lyricism, Distant Voices, Still Lives contains a distressing moment of realist violence: the scene in the coal cellar where Father (Pete Postlethwaite) ‘rains blow after blow down on [his daughter] Maisie [Lorraine Ashbourne] with the yard brush’ (Davies 1992: 78). Although the savage realism of this scene strongly suggests comparison with the Mother’s act of violence (raining blow upon blow upon Uncle Lol with her shoe) in the first of the memory episodes of Ray & Liz, this primal moment of uncontrolled cruelty, although significant, is again only one (of many) obvious parallels between the two films. Perhaps a more compelling parallel is the inexplicit presence of photographic content in the films. Clearly, the photograph represents a tacit agent of memory in Ray & Liz (as witnessed in the leitmotif passport photo that Ray keeps in his cell and to which, arguably, the film’s ampersand title refers). In general, the photograph, from an epistemological perspective, represents an object with the capacity to provide access to the past, furnishing causal evidence for the independent existence of absent subjects, objects and events, beyond the ‘veil of perception’ (Huemer 2001; Barthes 1982; Sontag 1977). In philosophical aesthetics, indeed, the phenomenon of the photograph’s capacity to exceed the symbolic register of representation is called ‘photographic realism’ (Scruton 1983; Walton 1984, 1997) and, as suggested in Chapter 5, Billingham’s use of his photographs (as well as his late mother’s photo album) as forensic motivational research in his work suggests that the artist is aware of the powerful epistemic (and semantic) potential of the photograph to invoke the real and thereby testify to the ambiguous objectivity of the past. As observed, Billingham’s film is structured, perhaps uniquely, by a process of mnemonic ‘intratextuality’ (a layering of reflexive, if implicit, references to his own photographic archive) yet Billingham’s cinematic tableaux are not simply dynamic ‘recreations’ – or reanimations – of prototypically ‘original’ still images. Rather, the photographic subtext in the film, a sequence of diaristic snapshots documenting lived experience, has an existential as well as epistemological presence in Ray & Liz. Providing direct realist reference to the (past) existence of the real-life individuals (and events) they depict, from a theoretical standpoint, his photographs (as objects) constitute non-fictional, discourse-independent, confirmation of the truth of the autobiographical past (the ‘past-as-present narrative’). Yet, paradoxically,

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this occurs in the film within a reconstituted autofictive (re-presentational and indirect-realist) environment, with actors deputizing for familial protagonists. Thus the complex ‘multilayered’ structure of self-reflexive references to his camera practice, as testified to throughout the film, has an important reality effect on the consolidation of the autobiographical process; what it clarifies, ultimately, is not only that the photograph signifies the key agency of remembrance in Billingham’s interpretation of memory realism, but more importantly, that the documentary effect realized in the activation of still snapshot in moving medium generates a kind of externalized simulation of the cognitive process of memory. In the cinematic remediation of the photograph, those palpable, childhood textures recognized by Lazic are conveyed. The significant factor in this connection is the way in which the spectator’s memory of previously glimpsed (half-remembered) imagery (from Ray’s a Laugh and elsewhere) is prompted and reactivated by the screen-image, producing a layered optical sensation that replicates the palimpsest phenomenology of remembering, the way, in other words, that the subjective recall of past experience is evoked by an immediately present sensory stimulus. In fact, during her discussion of the implication of photography in memory realism, Everett quotes Barker’s observation that Davies’s films are structurally analogous to the animated snapshots of a family album (2004: 73). The ‘static images’ strategy of Distant Voices, Still Lives, she suggests, is informed by the uncanny ontology of family photographs, ‘the memories depicted in the film’ to her seem to ‘“spring to life out of still photographs”’ (Orr in Everett 2004: 73). This proposition leads Everett to further elaborate the affinity between photography and autofiction in Davies’s cinematic space. Indicating the framed photograph on the wall in the famously symmetrical family tableau shot in Distant Voices, Still Lives (a freezeframe that aspires to the synthesis of still and moving image and which Davies admitted to Everett was an actual archive photo of his father), she comments: this scene confirms the ‘link with a “reality” which lies outside the normal parameters of film’ (2004: 74). Through verifying the extra-diegetic, nonfictional ‘existence of the father’, the photograph, she writes, functions ‘yet again to emphasize the hybrid status of autobiography’ (2004: 74). By suspending the fluidity of the medium, the ‘interplay’ between still and moving image that results from this superimposition draws attention to the distinct ontologies associated with the different media; and, by this gesture – a gesture of disruption, she claims – comes to symptomize some aspect of the past that has become ‘impossible to assimilate comfortably into the present of the narrative’ (2004: 76). This is a fascinating, if perplexing passage of reasoning. It is as if the moment of interruption caused by the still photographic image in the ‘diegetic horizon’ of the film evokes something from the past that resists direct representation. If the photograph in the movie results in what Hockenhull has termed the ‘frozen moment’ of temporal crystallization, a spot of sticky incompatibility that, precisely

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in the weird tension between photographic stillness and moving image, then it indirectly signifies – or evokes – the ambiguous presence of something that avoids being represented, directly referenced or named. In this instance, in other words, the photograph of the (absent) father indirectly expresses, according to Everett, the event that makes testifying to past traumatic experience difficult, if not impossible. Ultimately the function of the father’s archive photograph in Davies’s film (she argues) is metaphysical: to arrest narrative movement and thereby ‘enact the moment of trauma’ outside temporal reality by interrupting ‘the flow of the film’ (2004: 76). This condition of inertia is registered in the family’s eerie stillness within the frame of the moving image, which emotes the (unrepresentable) traumatic event – outside time – that imperceptibly invades the space of the image and ‘shakes’ the frame of representation (Richards 2008: 37). If the frozen attitude of the family reveals the extent of their continuing trauma, so powerful is this trauma that it has the power to halt the film, to take away the movement that defines it, to disrupt its process of articulation. (EVERETT 2004: 76)

Reference to still photography in Ray & Liz implies traumatic experience in a commensurable, if subtly distinct, way. First, as observed, the semi-static caesurae that halt Billingham’s film in moments of offline photographic motionlessness are, more precisely, glacially slow doubles, recapitulations (as opposed to frozen moments) of his own photographs (and, of course, reflexively refer to his own experience). Yet these self-referential scenes have a distinctly uncanny (doubling) relationship to the extradiegetic past that they mediate (indirectly through deference to photographs coded as more ‘authentic’) (Freud 1997: 212). In the pilot Ray (2015/6), for instance, an actual archive (passport) snapshot of his parents (retrieved from his late mother’s photo album) was used. In the feature film, however, this hinge image is substituted with a simulated re-enactment using Salinger & Smith in place of Billingham’s parents.4 This decision to replace the photo with a simulation is consistent with the reflexive relationship to photography developed in Billingham’s film (he did the same simulation trick with the photograph of Jason on the wall of Ray’s bedroom).5 Yet multi-layered reference to photographic material isn’t simply an indication of the layered complexity of artifice and autofiction in Ray & Liz; on the contrary, as implied by Everett apropos Davies, the diaphanous layering in Billingham’s film evinces the uncanny presence of the real insinuated into the film through the doubling agency of the photographic afterimage. The cinematic simulation of his photographs (including the photo of his parents) that is, creates a sensation of profound unease in the film; rather than confirming the authenticity of the autobiographical photographic material from which they ultimately derive, these scenes suspend diegetic progress (admittedly in a different way than the original photographic material inserted into Davies’s film) and indicate a kind of

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protrusion of psychological content into the image space. The diaphanous layers of close-up, semi-still photographic afterimages in Ray & Liz insinuate the presence of a traumatic Real into image space that cannot be directly registered because it exists in a state of actual absence. The effect of the ‘intratextual’ references to autobiographical photography in Billingham’s film is uncanny in the precise psychoanalytic sense of an experience of something vaguely amiss, out of the ordinary, yet strangely familiar. In Freud’s well-known analysis, the uncanny (das Unheimliche), rather than something abnormal and frightening, signifies ‘in reality . . . nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (Freud 1997: 217). By now it is a cliché of theory that the concept of the uncanny includes connotations of the domestic (through subliminal reference to the ‘homely’) but, in this application, the Unheimlich is no longer explicable in the homespun sense of the ‘unfamiliar’. More accurately, as Mark Fisher (2016) observes, the true modality of the Freudian uncanny is that mysterious sense of the ‘secretly familiar’, the feeling, that is, of the strange as already folded and doubled within the mundane. Indeed, ‘All of the ambivalences of Freud’s psychoanalysis’, Fisher claims, ‘are caught up’ in this concept (2016: 10). Overlapping with its antithesis, Unheimlich, to read Freud more carefully, ‘is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich’ (familiar, domestic) (1997: 201). ‘On the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (1997: 199). In repetition, the doubling of the indiscernible, something – some unpalatable, dormant, unrepresentable, unacceptable truth – is intuited while yet remaining hidden, in plain sight, in the most commonplace scene. Through their cinematic remediation Billingham’s autobiographical photographs evoke the uncanny. Again, it is well known that Freud’s essay identifies the theme of the uncanny with the motif of the double and the return of the repressed that accompanies the experience of doubling (1997: 210–12). Yet this process, less about ‘making the familiar – and the familial – strange’ and perhaps more ‘about returning the strange to the familiar, the familial’ (Fisher 2016: 10), through the cinematic reconstruction of the snapshots (by curating actor-Doppelgängers into semi-static tableaux) is the doubling mechanism through which the uncanny returns to the familiar in Billingham’s snapshots. Revealing the latent presence of something ‘secret and hidden’ at the edges and in the margins of the snapshots, trauma is sensed rather than perceived. In psychoanalytic theory, Slavoj Žižek observes, traumatic stimulus (the primal scene) cannot be processed by the representational categories of subjective experience because such morbid stimuli exceed the capacities of consciousness altogether. That is what the disturbing Freudian principle of Nachträglichkeit (the process of delayed effect) ultimately signifies: that trauma is necessarily (and literally) unexperienced and can only be processed ‘retroactively’ (Freud 1952).

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The ‘scene acquire[s] traumatic features only in retrospect’, Žižek clarifies, ‘when it became impossible to integrate the scene within the newly emerged horizon of narra​tiviz​ation​-hist​orici​zatio​n-sym​boliz​ation​’ (Žižek in Myers 2003: 27). Zones of interest where the traumatic event exceeds the function of perceptual experience can only be reintegrated, and the causal event incompletely reconstructed (from its vestigial and latent experiential fragments) through emotional mechanisms of condensation and displacement, but only following ‘a certain time lag’ (in Myers 2003: 27). It is not an overinterpretation to claim that the childhood event that forms the traumatic fulcrum round which (in Žižek’s language) ‘all later successive Symbolisations whirl’ (1994: 31) in Billingham’s work, arguably, is his family’s loss of habitat and relocation to the high-rise estate in the early 1980s. He never got over this upheaval. It is tokened in his work repeatedly (and compulsively) in latent forms and symptomatic absences that scarify conscious representation in morbidly complex ways. His entire practice is, in fact, haunted and convulsed by this experience of loss (recall the pervasive presence of the tower-block monoliths in the Black Country townscapes despite their actual absence from individual photographs). Of course, this traumatic experience recurs in the recent film but, paradoxically, not in any of its melodramatic or violent scenes; rather its latent presence is sensed in the hauntingly quiet moments of the film, such as the scene near the end where Richard requests to be removed from home and placed, like his younger brother, in foster care and then, silently, looks away (Billingham 2018).

.  . . to paternal space Acknowledging the ‘renewed interest’ in social realism in contemporary British screen culture, Samantha Lay disputes Thorpe’s thesis of uninterrupted continuum between the ‘Brit Grit’ movies of the late 1990s and the classic New Wave dramas of the early 1960s (whose origins lie further back in the non-fictional lyrical style advocated by the Documentary Movement of the 1930s and the free cinema of the post-war period)6 (Barnouw 1993; Thorpe 1999) (Lay 2002: 104). It may be more useful, she argues, to regard realism as a distinctive ‘mode of expression’ (if not exactly a ‘style’ then perhaps a constellation of non-essentialist filmic practices of representation) that has evolved rhizomatic yet recognizable instances, ‘movements and cycles’ throughout the history of cinema up to the present (2002: 2).7 Defending instead the moderate thesis that British film sustains an ‘extensionist’ relationship with social realism from the 1960s to the 1990s and beyond – a development that should not ignore its complex relationship with changing economic and cultural conditions – she locates a key distinction between the classic British Kitchen Sink (or angry-young-man) genre film and the 1990s renascence of cinematic realism in the ideological shift of emphasis away from

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public, social concerns to more personal and private preoccupations. External focus on politically relevant sociopolitical issues in the films of the first-generation social realist filmmakers has, Lay suggests, been abandoned in favour of a more introspective, existential focus on the psychological effects of socio-economic disadvantage on subjective agency, family life and personal identity in the 1990s. Drawing on Andrew Higson’s influential discussion of developments in realist practice in the epoch of the decline of industrial-era British working-class culture, Lay locates this shift of emphasis in the narrowing of focus to the psychosocial impact of economic change on (low-income, underprivileged) family life. Themes approached with a realist methodology in the relevant ‘gritty’ realist British films of the 1990s relate ambivalently to the post-industrial social landscape – the aftereffects of the dismantling of the welfare state and the denunciation of the working class (as ‘underclass’ [Dave 2006]) – yet although these socio-economic causalities are rarely examined in a direct way (perhaps too abstract or tedious – too unrelatable – to depict unequivocally) they are nevertheless complexly dramatized through the prism of other, more subjective, themes such as the psychological effects of social exclusion, unemployment, disadvantage and deprivation on the individual subject’s existential and moral struggle. There is, of course, a highly complex substrate of socio-economic causality underlying this process (the dismantling of the welfare state and chronic unemployment in post-industrial UK, as well as the failed managerialist measures to stem long-term welfare dependency and the ghettoization of the ‘underclass’) which makes it possible to regard British ‘gritty’ realism as relatively consistent with the social realist cinematic paradigm (even if, as Lay acknowledges, it is different in specific details).8 As society evolves, social problems mutate, in this case, privatization (and the increasingly atomized experience of unemployment, insecure work, precarity) conditions the phenomena of social atomization and anomie (arguably, the psychological effects of turning alienation inward, giving rise to pathological forms of introspection, humiliation, boredom, self-destructive behaviour) and this is refracted through the concerns of independent film culture (Loach, Leigh, Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Peter Mullan, Paul Andrew Williams, Alan Clarke, et al.9): alienation, council-estate ghettoization, addiction, domestic violence, abusive behaviour, criminality. ‘Social issues’ are now ‘explored through familial and personal relations,’ Lay observes, ‘although’ she acknowledges ‘part of the justification of this in the 1980s would be the distinct lack of work available to protagonists in the worlds of the films to take them outside of the home’ (2002: 85).10 Uninterested in the critique of this underlying structure of sociopolitical causality (due perhaps to fatigue with contrived ‘kitchen sink miserablism’ [Watson 2004: 17]) neorealist filmmakers tend to redirect narrative attention on what Lay refers to as the ‘dysfunctional family’ (2002: 85); a new emphasis that she insists has resulted in an enrichment of the genre: the ‘focus on family life has, in the 1990s’, she says, ‘allowed new issues to become part of the social

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realist vocabulary’ (2002: 106). So, although, ‘Poverty, unemployment and social exclusion’ may no longer constitute direct thematic concerns of contemporary realist filmmakers – may, indeed, appear peripheral, ‘signalled as contributory factors of family strife’ – the focus on the family in the neorealist ‘film text’, she provocatively claims, peripheralizes these wider social aspects because ‘it is the working-class family that [is taken to have] failed, not the state or capitalist society’ (2002: 103). Associated more strongly with the medium of still photography, it is critically feasible to locate Billingham’s related ‘dysfunctional’11 family cycle (from Ray’s a Laugh [1996] and Fishtank [1998] and Ray in Bed [1999] to the films Ray [2015/16] and Ray & Liz [2018]) within the cultural space of new-genre 1990s British social realist film, and although Lay makes no reference to Billingham, one of the more incisive contributions her study (published 2002) makes to the debate is a case analysis of Nil by Mouth (1997),12 Hollywood actor Gary Oldman’s harrowing autofictional debut film which confirms several (if not all) of the hypotheses regarding the evolution of contemporary neorealism (the transition from public to private, and consequently, from concerns of social structure to existential agency; the erosion of patriarchal hegemony and the resultant emotional crises of masculinity; the depoliticization of social class and emergence of the ‘underclass’; the shift from production to consumption; etc.).13 But most important for the purposes of this discussion is how Lay determines that these psychosocial dynamics are refracted through the phenomenon of the so-called ‘dysfunctional’ family (as described). But her critical reassessment of Oldman’s film in this context is particularly relevant for the way it elucidates the transition of Billingham’s postdocumentary photographic realism into neorealist film practice. ‘Thematically’, Lay argues, Nil by Mouth constitutes an exemplar of evolved neorealism in the contemporary period, for if ‘the film is not concerned with social, political and economic inequalities’ she adds, it is nevertheless ‘concerned with the disintegration of working class family life and this concern is solely represented by the concentration on one family’ (2002: 112). As in Billingham’s work, the alcoholism-addiction-abuse cycle is treated as a ‘family disease’ and not primarily a social problem (2002: 112). Ostensibly a feature film, Oldman’s movie (like Ray & Liz) is grounded in autoethnographic, non-fictional experience. Shot on location in the council estates of Deptford (in South-East London), where the actor grew up (Lay 2002: 111)14 the film is a savage portrait of alcoholic sociopath Raymond (Ray Winstone) and his toxic relationship with his wife Val (Kathy Burke): abusive, always teetering on the threshold of physical violence, one night, fuelled by drunken paranoia, Ray flares up into a terrifying out-of-control paroxysm of aggression and, in one of the most bestial scenes in cinema history, drags Val out of bed and viciously attacks her – knocking her to the floor and stomping her unconscious. (She suffers a miscarriage as a result.) Burke’s bruised and swollen face, which gradually heals as the film advances – inscribing a kind

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of visceral duration into the film text – is one of the most memorable aspects of Oldman’s movie.15 An important factor distinguishing Nil by Mouth from the New Wave realist tradition, according to Lay, is that the film is made by ‘someone who has actually come from not only the background, but the actual locations used in the film’ (2002: 112).16 What remains viscerally authentic about the film indeed is the celebrated actor’s existential commitment to a project that he waited until he had the resources (both financial and personal) to undertake (a fact which, for her, eclipses any suggestion of Hoggart’s ‘scholarship boy’ category): ‘It was in me,’ Oldman says. ‘It was almost like the solution I’d been looking for to a problem’ (in Lay 2002: 111). If, as Lay points out, ‘The directors of the British New Wave could only respond to a moment they helped to construct but did not live,’ the presence of the director of Nil by Mouth is insinuated in an unprecedented (weirdly penumbral) way in the film. Never simply author or director of a ‘work’, Oldman seems somehow to motivate the scenes from the peripheries of the mise en scène and yet, like Billingham, to remain an indelible or even insidious part of the film’s subtext (Oldman’s Hollywood star-status is not irrelevant to this phenomenon). To claim that the actor employs ‘the camera to “look again” from a safe distance at his own remembered past’ may not be quite right, yet Lay is correct to draw attention to the inventive lens practice employed to cinematically realize the fragmented texture of memory and the urgency of lived experience in Oldman’s film. Even if the distinctive style of this film, as Godfrey observes in a study of the ‘damaged man’ trope in the British neorealist films of the 1990s, engenders a sense of ‘detachment and distance’, it does little to mitigate the ‘discomfort of watching’ (2007: 11): from the semi-hallucinatory hand-held footage and the fragmentary, discontinuous rapid montage sequences to the slow prowling pans around characters and the unfocused confined-space close-ups, the camera practice in Nil by Mouth is an assemblage of sophisticated oblique angles, peripheral unobtrusive longshots and amateur home-movie framings.17 Although the film’s rapid-cut Nouvelle Vague– style sequences may owe more to the influence of MTV music videos than French hand-held realism, the resultant staccato montage of imagery produces ‘a tension’ according to Lay ‘between intimate involvement and critical distance’ (Lay 2002: 112–13), a cinematic experience that results in a new relational kind of realism that engages directly with ‘the real and the personal’ in unprecedented, sometimes disconcerting, visceral ways. Nil by Mouth’s enduring originality (which Lay identifies strongly with its social realist ‘mode of expression’) is precisely a function of Oldman’s obsessive existential ‘investment’ in the film.18 Like the exposure of private domestic space witnessed in Billingham’s camera practice throughout his family cycle (which Michael Tarantino described in identical terms as a combination of ‘intimacy and distance’) Oldman’s filmmaking techniques ultimately, like Billingham’s, imply ambivalence: the undecidability of someone, as Lay brilliantly puts it, on the ‘outside of the inside’. Indeed, it is at the

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aesthetic level, which institutes a severe realism noticeably devoid of any nostalgic or sentimental colouring, that Billingham’s radical post-documentary originality also lies. Less a documentation of contemporary British social culture than an autofictive reconstruction of its director-author’s formative experience, Ray & Liz – like Nil by Mouth – is made by ‘someone who lived it’, Lay concludes . . . ‘and escaped’ (2002: 114). But the key to Nil by Mouth’s existential ambivalence ultimately lies in its dedication: ‘In Memory of my Father’, which appears like an inscription on the black screen at the end of the movie. The performative speech act proclaimed by this dedication is what finally makes the realism of Oldman’s film commensurate with Billingham’s photographic practice (perfected, ironically, in a different medium); for it is only when the inscription appears on screen that the governing theme of Nil by Mouth is disclosed – an epiphany that reveals Oldman’s film as a retrospective filial statement. What is confirmed in the closing scene of Nil by Mouth, in other words, is that the theme of the film is paternity – albeit a distressing examination of toxic fatherhood. While Lay acknowledges (as does Dave) that although Oldman’s Ray is pitilessly portrayed as a grotesque, hysterically violent – almost, at times, subhuman – figure, he is nevertheless (astonishingly!) treated with understanding, even empathy, which is most apparent in the confessional, epiphanic scene when Ray, in conversation with his mate Mark, pathetically divulges his own father’s lack of affection: ‘I could’ve put that [“nil by mouth”] on his fucking tombstone. Y’know? Because I don’t remember one kiss, you know, one cuddle. Nothing’ (Oldman 1997). The final scene of the film is the key scene, for this is where the underlying (and enduring) theme of Oldman’s film is finally clarified. More precisely than the (‘dysfunctional’) family, Nil by Mouth’s specific concern, as disclosed at the end, is the problem of paternity. As Godfrey (2007) suggests, the 1990s trope of the ‘damaged’ male is fascinatingly expanded in Oldman’s film to encompass the heritage of patriarchal damage, the tragic patterns of paternal toxicity, destructive (and perhaps ultimately self-destructive) behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. Exploring this patrilineal heritage (the stage-trained) Oldman cunningly reworks the classic tragic inevitabilities of hamartia (arguably, ‘damage’) and recognition (anagnorisis) transfusing them into the singular damaged male protagonist of the 1990s neorealist film in a way that simultaneously – and brilliantly – evokes the classical Aristotelian responses of pity and fear (Godfrey 2007: 16). Set in the kitchen of the council flat (a tribute to the New Wave heritage) where the extended family is assembled in preparation for a visit (to Janet’s junky son Billy in the prison hospital); with earlier events consigned to the past, and Val’s face almost completely healed, the last scene of Nil by Mouth resembles a Daviesian family reunion. As they discuss Billy’s tragicomic fate, the camera nervously jerks back and forth from one face to the next across the charged, tense

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space between them; Christmas lights twinkle around the partition window behind Ray, sitting in his habitual chair with his six-year-old daughter Michelle on his lap; and, as she pats her father’s face, playfully pawing his nose and cheeks, the meaning of Oldman’s film is finally disclosed. It was Michelle, remember, who witnessed her father’s frenzied act of violence against her mother. When Ray, deflated following his exertions, retreated slowly and fretfully through the kitchen door and, as awareness sets in, notices his daughter observing him from the stairs: ‘Go back to bed, babe; go on, go to bed’. And appallingly, we realize that the primal scene we’ve just witnessed was experienced from her vantage point on the stairs in the dark. Now her father kisses her on the lips. With this final tender gesture, Dave suggests, Ray (with silent reference back to his own father’s ‘empty mouth from which not one kiss came’) (Dave 2006) attempts to redress his own father’s lack of affection. Yet even under the surface tenderness of this paternal token is there not a threatening – and surreptitious – undercurrent of latent violence that cannot be entirely suppressed? And, by the counterpoint shot of Janet’s troubled expression when she leaves the room, don’t we realize that this briefly tranquil reunion represents a temporary interlude of equilibrium? The last scene implies (in Ray’s perspiring face and pumped-up physique, Janet’s worried look, and Val’s nervous chattering) that the family’s problems have neither been confronted nor ‘resolved’ (Dave 2006: 15) and, as the door of the flat closes and everything goes dark, the complex thematic coherence of the film is crystallized in the inscription that appears chiselled in white on the black slab-like screen. Richard Billingham’s debut feature, although on one level admittedly quite different to Nil by Mouth, belongs, I would argue, to the same late 1990s sociocultural milieu as Oldman’s film (for, as suggested, the theme was incubating during this period in the Ray’s a Laugh cycle, only coming to efflorescence much later with Ray & Liz). The obvious intersection, a key scene of ugly domestic violence, is perhaps where we must acknowledge – like Davies’s Distant Voices Still Lives – that the difference between the films is most evident. For where the father character, consistent with stereotype, is the aggressor in Nil by Mouth, in the Billingham family counterexample, the mother (as mentioned in Chapter 2) was the violent party, and his alcoholic father, the acquiescent and passive one (yet, as witnessed in Fishtank, Ray Billingham could be extremely passive-aggressive). But where the comparison remains structurally compelling (beyond the shared working-class background, the escape and social mobility motivation as well as the revisiting of location to explore the ‘solution to a problem’) is in the peripeteia (and recognition) played out in the final disclosure (characterized, however, ultimately by what McCarthy has termed ‘the failure of tragedy’ [McCarthy in Trocchi 1960 x]).19 The last photograph of Billingham’s father was taken in 2006 in the residential care home he was transferred to following a stroke in 2003 (Fig. 7.1). In his

CONCLUSION    199

FIGURE 7.1 Richard Billingham, Jason, Walter and Ray (2006). Black and white photograph on aluminium (40.3 × 60 cm).

wheelchair Ray (seventy-five) looks very elderly. Frail and sunken, hair completely white, his loose-fitting clothes hang on his atrophied limbs. With elbows on the armrests to prop him up, he turns to face the artist’s infant son being held up by Jason (now a thirty-year-old adult) toward his grandfather. Yet Ray, despite his decline, is still there: the distinctive aquiline profile instantly recognizable and, even though not quite a laugh, a trace of the characteristic impish expression lighting up the old face.20 This image is a close relative of an earlier (circa 1995) picture of Billingham’s brother from the Ray’s a Laugh cycle but not published in the photobook (Untitled NRAL [1995]) which shows Jason, then a recent father himself, sitting in a folding deckchair with his infant child in his lap (Fig. 7.2). Some commentators (Tarantino 2000; Cork 2003) unfairly remarked on the semi-menacing way that Jason is holding the baby (with his right hand on its throat and an inscrutable expression on his face); he’s wearing a dance of death T-shirt which supplements the slightly malevolent connotations inadvertently expressed by the gesture. But it’s more likely just a clumsy articulation of inexperience and youth (he was eighteen when he became a father). Billingham’s last picture of Ray is not really an aesthetic work however, but a rather more conventional, prosaic image, almost, indeed, a typical family photo. (Although, having said that, there’s a hint of the Rubin’s Vase Illusion insinuated into the negative space between the profiles.) Yet, despite this, relative to his other family work, the photograph is nevertheless expressive for its uncharacteristically calm and contrasting quiet finality. After all the scenes of drunkenness and domestic violence, chaos and collapse, anarchy, squalor and neglect – as well those images of reclusion and quiet desperation – witnessed throughout his family cycle, here is that lifework’s ultimate image, and, unexpectedly, it is an icon of serenity, closure and equilibrium. Capturing something, finally, of that elusive intimacy of paternity he’s been searching for all along: ‘The pictures of Ray, Jason and Walter do draw the two bodies of work together,’ Billingham acknowledges, and ‘even

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FIGURE 7.2  Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1995) (80 × 120 cm).

help to make them one project’ (Billingham in MacDonald 2007). Above all – and in this sense strongly reminiscent of the final scene of Oldman’s Nil by Mouth – the story ends (amazingly) in a picture of reconciled paternity. In the instant it takes to scan the space between Jason on the left and Ray on the right, two generations of fatherhood are embraced and, closing the gap between the generations, as Billingham’s son reaches out toward his grandfather’s shoulder, looking from one to the other, the space of paternity is traversed, a space triangulated and closed by the unseen figure of the photographer, the son – now a father himself – taking the picture, and with this, taking his place at the apex of that familial figure: the precise point where the filial gaze becomes the paternal gaze.

CONCLUSION    201

202 

NOTES

Introduction 1 Billingham is currently Professor of Fine Art in the University of Gloucestershire

(since 2006) and Professor of Creative Industries, Middlesex University (since 2012).

2 Frank’s back cover citation reads: ‘Flash into the face of Mom and Dad. A British

family-album so cool that I can see and hear what goes on between the frames. No room for judgment or morality . . . Reality and no pretence. Richard Billingham is the son and he knows – his family.’

3 Elizabeth Manchester indicates the connection between Billingham and Goldin’s

practice on the Tate (website) Artists’ Profiles, 2005. The Sensation generation artists are variously influenced by the legacy of British punk culture: Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, the Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Mark Wallinger, Mat Collishaw, Gavin Turk, among others, can be regarded as part of a late efflorescence of the punk revolution of 1976–7. ‘Children of Thatcher’, they may be, but the YBAs are equally the progeny of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

4 The group of post-war British realist painters remembered as the ‘Kitchen Sink’

school were the artists who exhibited at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in London, and alongside Bratby and Smith, included Derrick Greaves and Edward Middleditch. The Beaux Arts Quartet became better known as the ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters following a (slightly pejorative, but brilliant) review by David Sylvester in Encounter (1954: 61–4). In reference to the ordinariness of the subject matter, domestic still-lives in working-class interiors, Sylvester asks the (in hindsight) inevitable question, ‘Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too’ (1954: 61). For the genealogy of the Kitchen Sink ‘movement’ and its association with the London School, see Causey (1990: 19–27). The Kitchen Sink appellation was, more enduringly, applied to the British New Wave Woodfall production company films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, paradigmatically, the films directed by Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson – adaptations from plays and novels by Northern working-class writers such as Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, John Osborne, and Keith Waterhouse, as well as (the Londoner), Lynne Reid Banks (for context, see Hutchings 2009; Murphy 2009).

5 In interview with Lingwood he even lays claim to a certain ‘ambivalence’ about

Francis Bacon: ‘It’s that redemption through form which Fuller talked about. I always thought there was no redemption through form in Bacon’s work – it was very sensational’ (in Lingwood 1998a: 56). He later told me that he’s changed over time

and added that most of his interests ‘were formed in libraries’ (Billingham 2018). He didn’t read Fuller until university (1991–4) and now wonders if he completely understood the concept of redemption through form, but that has come to associate the concept with Auerbach’s reference to David Bomberg’s ‘spirit in the mass’ (email conversation, 16 May 2018). Now he regards the idea as ‘quasi religious’ and defends a central principle of Bacon’s as relevant to his aesthetic: “I am optimistic about nothing”’ (Billingham 2017b). 6 Billingham’s screen work also warrants comparison with (in that his work has clearly

informed) the work of a later generation of British, Irish and Scottish filmmakers, including Shane Meadows, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Perry Ogden and Peter Mullan, motivated by the impulse to preserve traces of the rich and resilient workingclass culture in a social and politico-economic environment that has led to its inexorable decline (but the latitude of this book isn’t broad enough to elaborate this connection beyond brief allusion); see Rose (2019) and Gilbey (2019).

7 See also Remes (2007b). 8 For a recent reappraisal that assesses the cultural contribution and impact of the

Sensation show, see Fullerton’s accessible survey, Artrage! (2016b).

9 With some notable exceptions: brief exterior shots (and shots outside the window)

are inserted at precise moments in the film.

10 The Family was produced by Paul Watson and directed by Franc Roddam, and

originally ran for one series on BBC1 from 3 April to 26 June 1974.

11 Some key examples of this tendency include (but are not limited to) the confessional

short super-8 films and videos of Tracey Emin, Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) and How it Feels (1996); the social experimental practice of Gillian Wearing (some of it specifically conceived as a critical response to reality culture) especially the projects Confess All on Video . . . (1994) and Prelude (2000); Sam Taylor-Johnson’s short video Brontosaurus (1995) and Sarah Lucas’s vernacular collages.

12 Lingwood, ‘Inside the Fishtank’ (1998b: 55); see also Remes (2007b) who

acknowledges that his ‘snapshots of everyday life and voyeuristic reality-drama appear to be products of the same culture’.

13 Dublin premiere of Ray & Liz, Lighthouse Cinema, 28 February 2019. See also

O’Callaghan (2019).

14 Thinking of himself primarily as an artist of place, when asked about his particular

place, the artist answers, ‘That would be Cradley Heath in the Midlands. I was born there. I went back to make a film there’ (Billingham 2018).

15 Images used here in the sense of Wilfrid Sellars’s concept of the ‘manifest image’ distinct

from the ‘scientific image’ of the world, two alternative representational frameworks for conceiving the nature of reality as it fundamentally is (O’Shea 2007: 12).

16 Some acrylic studies survive from this period (Cotton 2014). 17 For analysis, see ‘Figure in a Room: Ray a Film by Richard Billingham (2015)’

(Cashell 2017).

18 The campaign raised approximately £20,000 (Adams 2016). 19 Ray & Liz is supported by the BFI Film Fund and Ffilm Cymru with National Lottery

Funding. The production company is Primitive Film and the film was produced by Jacqui Davies. Tracy Granger edited the film and director of photography was Daniel

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Landin. Billingham was nominated for a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut for a British Writer, Director or Producer in 2019 (Benbow 2019). 20 Channel 4 documentary series Benefits Street first broadcast in January 2014 ran

for two seasons of five episodes. Produced by Love Productions and narrated by (ex-Coronation Street actor) Tony Hirst, the show centred on the residents of James Turner Street in Winson Green (Birmingham), a disproportionate percentage of which subsist on social welfare. But what was initially pitched as a socially concerned conversation about attitudes to the underprivileged and community solidarity in socially disadvantaged areas turned into uncomfortable and evaluative commentary on welfare dependency and criminality and, for some, led to a resurrection of the Victorian debate about the undeserving poor (Fisher 2014).

21 Apparently, it was Romer’s daughter, a student of photography in Falmouth

University, who, familiar with Ray’s a Laugh, convinced her initially reluctant father to take the role (Billingham, in conversation, Cheltenham, 2015; Dublin International Film Festival, 28 February 2019).

22 ‘Benefits Street is an excuse for viewers to judge and sneer, says [former labour MP for

Ladywood] Clare Short,’ The Guardian, 4 February 2014. Also officially condemned by the present (2018) Ladywood MP, Labour’s Shabana Mahmood during political debate on the welfare dependency issue, ‘I found it shocking that Channel 4 or any other organisation would present poverty as entertainment,’ she said, ‘it is profoundly wrong’ (in Walker 2014). Ashad Mahmood (Bradford) who lived near Winson Green organized a petition for the show to be removed, saying, ‘Benefits Street has portrayed people on income support as scroungers and it’s wrong. . . . The backlash and abuse of social networks towards people on benefits as a result of this show has shocked me’ (Collier 2014).

23 Artsnight, episode 1 (BBC2, 2015) curated by actor Maxine Peake discusses the

mediation of social class in popular culture. The programme examined, among other elements, Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney’s play, A Taste of Honey (1959), including Tony Richardson’s 1962 film. Benefits Street’s critical location in this debate is analysed by Mark Fisher (2018: 237) who argues that any controversial discussion of the reasons why the ‘participants had ended up on benefits’ is avoided; and that’s why there’s never any ‘mention of the social causes of unemployment, . . . no interrogation of the political agendas driving the focus on those claiming benefits, nor any examination of austerity as a political project’ (2018: 237).

Chapter 1 1 From John Cooper Clarke’s poem ‘Beezley Street,’ ‘it’s a sociologist’s paradise / each

day repeats’ (Clarke 2012: 85).

2 Williams is Professor of the History and Culture of Photography and Director,

University of Arts, London (UAL).

3 All the literature related to the exhibition is in the Val Williams Archive at the Martin

Parr Foundation in Bristol.

4 A key figure in the Billingham story, Collins was picture editor of the Telegraph

Magazine from 1990 to 1996 and is currently visiting professor of Photography at the

NOTES    205

University of Suffolk. He was also one of many people (along with Martin Parr, Frits Giertsberg, Mark Haworth Booth and Anna Fox) invited to propose works for the show and, in this capacity, recommended Billingham. 5 Indeed, not all organizers were equally convinced of his contribution. Williams

remembers that she had to defend his inclusion in the show (Williams 2020, email conversation).

6 On his contribution to the exhibition, see Collins (2013). 7 On the strength of the Barbican triptych, Paul Graham put Billingham in touch with

London gallerist Anthony Reynolds, which led to the artist’s debut solo exhibition two years later.

8 On the specifics of Brandt’s aesthetic ‘pictorialism’ and how it interacts with his

documentary realism, see Warburton (1993).

9 Email correspondence with artist, 2017. 10 The glass was added by Manet sometime between 1867 and 1872. 11 Wearish (not to be confused with ‘wearyish’), incidentally, signifies ‘feeble, withered,

shrunk’ (Fletcher 1978: 138).

12 From as early as 1944 (with Three Figures at the base of a Crucifixion) Bacon displayed

an unusual commitment to the form: ‘I like the juxtaposition of the images,’ he said, ‘separated on three canvases’ (1995: 100). A significant turning point in Bacon’s negotiation of the triptych form was the powerful and disturbing Triptych May-June 1973 (in response to the suicide of his friend George Dyer) following which, in the 1980s, his approach became increasingly refined, achieving more definition and monumental simplicity shortly before his death in 1992.

13 Billingham’s glasses gave his impression more plausibility. 14 According to Billingham, Ray’s parents put a deposit on the house, and Ray

continued to pay the mortgage with his wages till it was sold (Billingham, email, 2019).

15 Tinsley’s was sold in 2005 and later repurposed as a housing block; they still have a

hardware shop in Wednesbury.

16 ‘Ray and Liz took it because we were literally starving,’ Billingham says (in Adams

2016).

17 He recently added that when he was growing up, his friends referred to the Riddins

estate housing blocks as ‘beyond the Thunderdome’ (Dublin Film Festival, 28 February 2019).

18 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 19 The Camden Town Group was convened by Sickert between 1911 and 1913 at 8

Fitzroy Street. The group comprised sixteen associates including Sickert, Gilman and Gore, namely, Bayes, Bevan, Drummond, Innes, John, Lamb, Lewis, Lightfoot, Manson, Pissarro, Ratcliffe, and Doman Turner (Baron 1976: 17). They agreed on one main principle: there should be no women members.

20 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 21 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 22 According to Reed’s Introduction to the Roger Fry Reader, Sickert ‘justified his

work in purely visual terms, vehemently resisting any suggestion of sympathy for

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his working-class models. Moreover, nothing in Sickert’s images of brothels and music halls – subjects he drew from French impressionism – challenged his public’s conceptions of working-class life as violent and sordid’ (Reed 1996). 23 Joyce’s strategy involved the intentional suppression of semantic colour, mobilized

to describe a spiritual syndrome identified as ‘hemiplegia of the soul’, a cultural (and moral) paralysis that characterized existence in the damp Anglo-Irish capital at the turn of the century.

24 The epiphany can be characterized as the vanishing point of Joycean narrative that

imprecise moment of suspended revelation (often signified by ellipsis in the text: . . .) which coincides with an experience of unsettling clarity for the protagonist (and elicits a corresponding shift in perspective for the reader). Joyce kept a journal of ephemeral observations, that is, trivial details, fragments of colloquial chatter rescued from the oblivion of quotidian reality and reserved for later interpolation into his fiction (Joyce 1977: 188).

25 On the epiphany, see Susan Bazargan, ‘Epiphany as a Scene of Performance’. In Oona

Frawley (ed.) A New and Complex Sensation, Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners (2004). Dublin: Lilliput Press, pp. 44–54 where the epiphany is described as ‘cinematic’; but, in the stillness of its structure, is it not closer to photographic transparency and hence to Billingham’s photographic realism? In the autobiographical Stephen Hero, an earlier manuscript draft of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, written between 1904 and 1906, Joyce provides more information about the epiphany (1977: 188).

26 See Sickert’s reference to the keyhole view and its (erroneous) association with

prurience and the pornographic attitude in his essay ‘Degas’, Burlington Magazine. November 1917. In Sitwell (ed.) (1947: 147); in Tickner (2000: 31).

27 Tickner (2000: 26) quotes Stella Tillyard on Sickert’s half-hidden but conspicuous

detail: ‘The chamberpot – always symbolic of licentiousness, waste, and prostitution in the eighteenth-century caricatures . . . adds a note of squalor to the scene’ (Tillyard in Allen ed. 1995: 196).

28 According to Tickner, her type was regarded as ‘the lowest class of unfortunates’

(2000: 6). It must, she remarks, have struck Sickert ‘that he had been painting a nude model in a Camden Town bedsitter little more than a mile from Emily Dimmock’s lodgings; that her public-house haunts and trips to music halls were all in his neighbourhood; that the man arrested for her murder was a commercial artist; and that this girlfriend Ruby Young described herself euphemistically as “an artist’s model”’ (Tickner 2000: 6–7). Novelist Patricia Cornwell has hypothesized that the painter was responsible for the notorious series of unsolved Whitechapel murders in the late nineteenth century. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, and Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, she argues that she possesses forensic evidence in support of this hypothesis (Cornwell 2003). Apparently, she purchased more than 30 paintings by Sickert to support her exposé, destroying one of them in the process. See Gibbons (2001).

29 The series comprises three masterworks related to the theme: Summer Afternoon, or

What Shall We Do for the Rent? (c. 1907–9 Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery Fife); The Camden Town Murder, or What Shall We Do about the Rent? (1908 Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven); and L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909 private collection), discussed above. Alongside these, there are several oil studies, sketches and squaredup preparatory drawings related to the theme (Tickner 2000).

NOTES    207

30 Julian Germain interview, 2018. 31 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 32 In a 2007 Photoworks interview (in MacDonald 2007), the artist admits that it

wasn’t until 1995 – during the editing of Ray’s a Laugh – that he became aware of contemporary photography and began to appreciate the compositional strategies, for instance, in Larry Clark’s photobook Tulsa (1971).

Chapter 2 1 Title of a track by The Fall from their 1981 EP Slates (Rough Trade: RT 71). 2 Interview with Julian Germain, 9 July 2018. 3 Germain clarifies that Billingham didn’t start properly utilizing these cameras until

after he graduated.

4 Interview with Collins, 16 February 2018. 5 To clarify, in total there are fifty-five photographs including flyleaf and endpaper

photos in Billingham’s ninety-nine-page (unpaginated) book.

6 Keller and his designer Hans Werner Holsworth discussed formulating a typeface

that would be as ‘ugly’ as the content. The cover was designed intentionally to be ‘vulgar’ (Cotton 2014).

7 Pls 18, 19, and 33 in the Errata edition (2014). 8 The artist reminds those searching for deep and meaningful explanations that

photography is an expensive pursuit.

9 Billingham was awarded the Felix H. Man Memorial Prize in 1995 for a proto-RAL

family album of approximately twenty photos. Collins nominated him for this prize.

10 These are now collector’s items. Martin Parr owns a copy, the cover and selected

internal pages of which are reproduced in the Errata edition of Ray’s a Laugh (2014).

11 Not the 1993 movie adaptation directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring

Leonardo de Caprio (as Toby).

12 A condition of temporality captured in the plays of Samuel Beckett, arguably, in the

sense relevant to Billingham’s photobook, in Endgame (1957) rather than (the more common reference) Waiting for Godot.

13 Collins’s later claim that a conclusive sequence was assembled in ‘disobedience

to Richard’s (and Julian’s) wishes’ (Collins 2019) is repudiated by Germain and Billingham.

14 He was considering the option (with Germain) of travelling to Switzerland to try ‘to

stop the print run’ (Collins 2019).

15 The same observation applies to the curation of his work. Apropos this debate,

Billingham recently emphasized (in conversation) that the photographs of this series ought to be regarded as separate individual pieces (autonomous of whatever curational or editorial schema is latterly imposed on them).

16 Established by John Osborne, Tony Richardson and Harry Saltzman, Woodfall Films

produced the key works of the British New Wave, Richardson’s celebrated adaptations

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of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1958), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962); Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963). 17 The establishing shot convention has, in the meantime, become a generic cliché. Early

episodes of British soap opera Coronation Street (originally influenced by New Wave realism) began with the omniscient view ‘outside and above’ (Lovell 1996: 163) the locality before the individual interiors of houses were penetrated.

18 The ‘framing of That Long Shot’, he adds, ‘requires a very high camera position (That

Hill . . .)’ (Higson 1996: 153).

19 A motive that is further explored in Billingham’s later landscape photography (see

Chapter 4).

20 See Higson: ‘the “kitchen sink” films are less about the conditions of the industrial

working classes and their collective consciousness, than they are about the attempts of individuals to escape from those conditions and that consciousness, associated as they are with an older generation irredeemably tainted by mass culture’ (1996: 146–7).

21 This archive material was omitted from the final draft in favour of the non-

contextualized photographs in the effort to avoid ‘trying too hard to tell a story’ (Billingham 2018). The episode is dramatized in the feature film Ray & Liz (2018) (see Chapter 6).

22 The photograph was cropped to exclude Jason and used as the cover for the 2014

Errata Edition.

23 An observation made in 2000 when the image was shown in Billingham’s

retrospective exhibition in the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (see Chapter 4).

24 This photograph is included in 1001 Photographs You Must See Before You Die.

London: Cassell, 2017.

25 On the semiotics of composition and graphic layout, see Kress and Van Leeuwen’s

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006). The – quite dramatic – symbolic reverse connotations indicated here can be confirmed by comparing the (mistaken) mirror-image printing of the first fight scene in the photobook’s sequence (as it was published in Nick Hornby’s review [1996]) with the proper orientation of the snapshot in the book. Note also the audacious coincidence of the dog’s muzzle with Liz’s mouth.

26 This is confirmed in Billingham’s autobiographical feature-length film Ray & Liz

(2018, see Chapter 6). And for contextual contrast, see Gary Oldman’s autofictional film Nil by Mouth (1997), where his namesake Ray is both the alcoholic and the physical abuser. See Purcell (2001).

27 On the toilet in art history, see the fascinating article ‘Toilets of our time’ by Matthew

Bown (Bown 2019).

28 On the emergence of the British ‘underclass’ in the 1990s, see Murray (1990). 29 Stallabrass was denied permission to reproduce Billingham’s photographs as

illustrations in High Art Lite.

30 For example, Walter Lassaly, photographer on A Taste of Honey. Higson demonstrates

that the British New Wave films were noted for the extraction of a certain ‘vitality’ from ‘grinding poverty’; it can be regarded as generating a cinematic form of

NOTES    209

‘miserablism’ according to which ‘poverty and squalor’ can be aestheticized, rendered ‘picturesque’ or lyrical (hence Higson’s category, ‘poetic’ realism) in order, he argues, to evoke a sympathetic response (1996: 151). 31 This Lacanian definition of the Real was popularized in application to contemporary

aesthetic practice by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real (1996). It is referred to in connection with the work of Lucian Freud by David Alan Mellor in a manner that bears comparison with Billingham. ‘Foster’s “Real”’, Mellor explains, is ‘based on Jacques Lacan’s definition, a traumatic encounter that might make its way to the surface as a traumatic physical point, a knob of dead paint/skin protruding in such a way that, “we almost seem to touch the real”’ (Mellor 2002: 59).

32 Goldin’s photography is influenced by US punk culture in a similar way. What needs

to be pointed out here is that the Sensation generation emerged as a constellation of heterogeneous artists that were variously influenced by British punk culture (i.e. the popular music anarcho-punk revolution of 1976–7). The connection apropos Billingham is hinted at by Cotton when she (accurately) describes the experience of ‘reading’ Ray’s a Laugh as ‘a two-note punk tune pulsing through the image sequence’ (Cotton 2014: np).

Chapter 3 1 Borrowed from the title of Oliver James’s study of family life, They F*** You Up (2002)

(itself appropriated from the first line of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This be the Verse’) (Larkin 1974: 30).

2 Curated by Thomas Collins and Nancy Newhall. 3 It became MC Saatchi in 1995 following (Lord) Maurice Saatchi’s departure (he was

ousted by investors concerned with his ‘profligacy’). Charles Saatchi has not been involved in the (financially struggling) group since 2006 (Meddings: 2019). But during their heyday they not only ‘changed the industry forever’ (according to Ivan Fallon, Saatchi brothers’ biographer) creating successful campaigns for some of the largest corporations but their influence extended to politics – the Conservative Party notoriously employed the company for their 1979 election campaign.

4 This DIY ethos was influenced, arguably, by the underground rave / acid house scene

rather than some sudden enterprising spirit of entrepreneurship. Sixteen Goldsmiths’ students participated in Freeze and Hirst invited key influencers in the London art world such as Norman Rosenthal, Nicholas Serota, as well as Saatchi to the show.

5 Saatchi commissioned some of Hirst’s signature pieces, including The Physical

Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) for £50,000.

6 There is some confusion over the provenance of the epithet. It was first used for the

three legendary exhibits of contemporary art Young British Artists I-III held at the Saatchi Gallery between March 1992 and January 1994 and not by Michael Corris as is sometimes erroneously maintained.

7 ‘Saatchi-effect’ refers to the symbiotic relationship between the Conservative

Government and Saatchi’s advertising agency under Press Secretary Bernard Ingham beginning in 1979. It led to the transformation of the concept of political canvassing (Elsaesser 2006: 49) most successfully implemented in the 1979 election campaign for

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which Saatchi Saatchi designed the ‘Labour’s Not Working’ poster featuring images of a depressed line of people presumably queuing at a welfare office. 8 The Saatchi Gallery relocated to Chelsea in 2008. 9 When the exhibition closed, the (financially struggling RA) announced record

attendances for an exhibition of contemporary art: nearly 300,000 paying viewers visited Burlington House during its run. RA resignations included Michael Sandle, Gillian Ayres, Anthony Green and Craigie Aitchison. On the opening day, Marcus Harvey’s monumental painting Myra (1995) was attacked on two occasions. Peter Fisher smeared it with red and blue ink and Jacques Role egged it. Both men were arrested and later released (Cashell 2009: 54). On the controversy, see also Chapman (2006).

10 The late Winnie Johnson and Ann West, mothers of Moors Murder victims Keith

Bennett and Lesley Ann Downey were joined by members of Kidscape (a child protection lobby group) to protest outside Burlington House for the duration of the show. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the so-called Moors Murderers, were still alive at the time.

11 Writing recently in the New York Review of Books, Regina Marler provides a succinct

retrospective reassessment of the Sensation generation, in the process, summing up its contribution to international cultural discourse. She observes that, although sharing no coherence of form, style or content, the ‘Britart’ movement developed an original ‘openness to materials and methods’ (as exemplified by Sarah Lucas’s toilet sculptures and Marc Quinn’s life-masks cast in his blood) and, in addition to the already discussed ‘entrepreneurial (some say careerist) spirit in art-making and promotion’, will be remembered for its radically original crossbreeding of conceptual art with popular culture as well as its ‘attitude of ironic detachment’ (Marler 2019:11).

12 The Berlin Sensation proved so popular that they extended the original closing date

(December 1998).

13 See Samantha Lay (2009: 104, 122). 14 Neither a Goldsmiths nor Royal College graduate, nor based in London, Billingham

was something of an anomaly in the Saatchi conclave.

15 The curator, as Boris Groys (2013: 45) argues, ‘can’t but place, contextualize, and

narrativize works of art – which necessarily leads to their relativization’ (45).

16 This is not, strictly speaking, accurate, as his work had been selected for Obrist’s Life/

Live exhibition of British art in Paris in 1996 and had also appeared in a group show in MOMA and in the Anthony Reynolds Gallery prior to this. However, not only was Sensation the largest and most comprehensive group exhibition he had been involved in, it was also the most high-profile, diverse and controversial, which had the consequence of associating him with an aesthetic phenomenon / movement.

17 Stallabrass (1999); Molyneaux (1998). 18 ‘Above all, the term “chav”’, Jones claims, refers to ‘any negative traits associated with

working-class people – violence, laziness, teenage pregnancies, racism, drunkenness and the rest’ (Jones 2012: 8).

19 See Brown (in Murray) (1990: 43–8). 20 This reaches its apogee in Paul Abbott’s Shameless (Channel 4, 2004) in which the

representation of the working class evolves into a culture-industry escapist category (admittedly with its origins in Kitchen Sink realism’s naïve representation of the working class) for the entertainment of the new embourgeoisement of consumer

NOTES    211

taste, where the working class becomes synonymous with ‘the wild body, with unregulated hedonism, with violence, drug abuse and filthy sex’ (Stallabrass 1999, in Dave 2006: 98). But Stallabrass continues the paragraph with the following critical observation: ‘For the majority of working-class people who are not fans of the Sunday Sport, this simple-minded identification of their culture with the products of pornmongers and media monopolists is pretty insulting’ (1999: 121). 21 Remes, ‘Reinterpreting Unconventional Family Photographs’, 2007, np. 22 Saatchi Gallery Artist Profile: Richard Billingham: www​.s​​aatch​​igall​​ery​.c​​om​/ar​​tists​​/

rich​​ard​_b​​illin​​gham.​​htm

23 It was cropped rather severely for Ray’s a Laugh. This is especially evident at the

bottom right of the frame where the dome of the building and the metal ashtray have been cut off by the frame.

24 Similar tell-tale anamorphic effects have been observed in Vermeer (Hockney 2006). 25 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 26 EE: 23, 43, 47. 27 See also the photograph of his parents on the bed (Plate 20) which is taken in this

space.

28 Compare also the explicit affinities between the painterly large-scale snapshot of the

dog in the Sensation show (Untitled NRAL [1995] Plate 31) and Bacon’s early canine studies, especially Dog (1952), Study of a Dog (1952) and Man with Dog (1953).

29 Note the faded blotchy ‘L-I-Z’ among the avian designs. 30 Fishtank (produced by Adam Curtis and James Lingwood). First broadcast as an

episode of TX Illuminations series, 1998.

31 Artangel is a London-based production company specializing in site-specific

contemporary installation art. Founded in 1991, it is registered as a charitable organization, and is funded by the Arts Council of England and private patronage. Its directors are James Lingwood and Michael Morris.

32 See also Jan Estep (2011) for whom the pain relates to the ‘violation of privacy.’ 33 David Sylvester, remarking on the ‘extreme . . . detachment’ characteristic of Sickert’s

Camden Town series, famously claimed that his attitude to his subject suggested that of a ‘zoologist’ as opposed, say, to a ‘psychologist’ (Sylvester 1996: 155). Billingham’s highly compatible viewpoint in Fishtank derives from a profound understanding of Sickert.

34 See Billingham to Lingwood (1998b: 58): ‘You could have it on a loop and come into

it at any point and watch it and it would make as much sense’.

35 Written by Phil Spector and recorded by the Teddy Bears reaching no. 1 in the US

charts in 1958; version by Nancy Sinatra released in 1962 as B-side of ‘Like I Do.’ Interestingly, it was inspired by the inscription on his father’s gravestone.

36 This scene strongly recalls Sam Taylor-Johnson’s macabre video Brontosaurus (1995),

a naked male figure dancing in a room to Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei (Adagio for Strings) (but which was choreographed to create the incongruous melancholy effect, she later revealed, to techno). Incidentally, we can hear Richard talking to Jason from ‘behind’ the camera: ‘It’s up here . . . on the wall’.

37 This negative space between the protagonists is also explored in Ray’s a Laugh: see,

for example, RAL #6 (pp.10–11) of Ray and Liz eating dinner on either side of the

212   N OTES

couch. The split in the sofa cushioning behind them coincides almost exactly with the centrefold stitching of the gutter (see also RAL #2 pp.1–2). 38 This, of course, is additionally hilarious because it’s identical to the scene in

Chinatown (Polanski 1974) where Gittes (Jack Nicholson) tears out the page from the ledger in the DA’s office while coughing to mask the noise.

39 Again, this scene provides important insight into the provenance of Billingham’s

Zoo Project (2004–6). Following his mother’s death, the artist recovered these photo albums which included snapshots (and postcards) of daytrips to Dudley Zoo with the kids (this was the starting point of Zoo). Also: there is a passport photo-booth image of Ray and Liz in her album that Billingham appropriates for his short feature film Ray (2015) and which he later reconstructs (using actors) in his full-length feature film Ray & Liz (2018) (see Chapter 6).

40 Written and recorded by Lee Roy Abernathy in 1947 with the title ‘Gospel Boogie’.

The version by Alvin Stardust was released as a single in 1981 which peaked at number 56 in the UK charts.

41 The textural interplay between (polka-dot) fabric print pattern and skin in this

shot again invokes Rodchenko’s Portrait of Mother (1924) and constitutes another sustained instance of intertextuality in Billingham work.

42 See Untitled NRAL (1994). 43 Comparisons with John Healy’s redemptive autobiography The Grass Arena (1988)

were recognized by Julian Germain who, during the editing of Ray’s a Laugh, was reading the Irish author’s visceral chronicle of homelessness on the streets of London (having previously seen Gillies MacKinnon’s film adaptation of the book in 1992) (Germain 2018).

44 Billingham’s video predates the Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez 1999). 45 See Tony Williams’s discussion of the cinema of Terence Davies (Williams 2006: 243). 46 See Levinas, On Escape (2003: 64). 47 An observation Milan Kundera makes in Encounter (2009) apropos the similarity of

theme in Bacon and Beckett.

48 Davies’s work has been characterized as an ‘unsentimental and unflinching

examination of both the suffering and the joy of family life’ (Everett 2005: 188–9). Despite differences in their understanding of the ‘texture’ of reality, their shared ‘obsession with detail’ has led both directors to a highly unique and uncompromising combination of realism and aesthetic complexity. Williams emphasizes Davies’s evocation of the ‘inner life of a working-class family (rather than from without as in the 1960s British New Wave).’ The writer-director avoids ‘Hollywood escapism’ and what he calls ‘British literalism’ (2006: 244).

49 Davies, incidentally, describes the Trilogy as an ‘exorcism’ of personal suffering. 50 Citing Vermeer as a key influence, Davies says his intention was to attempt to

simulate the light effects achieved in the paintings in textures of black and white (Davies 2008 in Davies 1976-83). But this reference becomes especially evident in the shot in Madonna and Child where Tucker, preparing his mother’s cocoa, is pouring the warm milk into the mug from the saucepan in mimesis of The Milkmaid (1658–60).

51 And it is also perhaps present in the scenes of Death and Transfiguration where the

camera focuses on distorting rivulets of rainfall on the window.

NOTES    213

52 See Benjamin (1999a: 510) where he characterizes the medium of photography as the

‘optical unconscious’.

53 Adams’s review of Billingham’s exhibition Zoo at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in

2007 is titled, ‘From my family . . . . To other animals’ (2007). The artist is quoted by Tarantino as remarking, ‘everybody watches fish in a tank, don’t they? And you could say my family are like that’ (2000: 84).

Chapter 4 1 At the Galeria Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris; Regen Projects,

Los Angeles; and the Luhring Augustine, New York (all 1997).

2 The Citibank Photography (Deutsche Börse) Prize show was held at the Royal

College of Art, London in 1997.

3 Galerie Monica Reitz, Frankfurt am Main; Galerie Mot Van den Boogaard, Brussels;

and the British School, Rome.

4 ‘His record is about forty hours when he’s coming down off speed, he needs summat

to do, he gets blisters on his fingers’ (Anon., review of Ikon show in Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2000).

5 Other nominees were Isaac Julian and Mike Nelson. The 2001 award was presented

by pop singer Madonna. On the question of unfairness, see Januszczak (2014). ‘Creed broke into most people’s consciousnesses in 2001, when his feeble piece of conceptual art . . . won the Turner Prize.’ In Januszczak’s opinion, ‘There were some good artists on the Turner shortlist that year. Mike Nelson . . . was one. Richard Billingham, with his startling photographs of his decrepit working-class family was another’ (2014: 14–15). That year Billingham’s work was also selected for the 49th Venice Biennale.

6 Townscape, Christopher Neve informs us, is a ‘relatively new’ term which first

appeared in the Architectural Review in the 1940s (Neve 1990: 56).

7 Despite what’s suggested in the Ikon show catalogue, strictly speaking, this was not

the first exhibition of this body of work. Several photographs from the Cradley Heath series were shown at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 1998 (Billingham, email, 2018). Incidentally, there’s some fantastic camcorder footage on the Reynolds Gallery website of the Billingham family (Ray, Liz, Jason) travelling by train to visit the exhibition. See Kohl (2019).

8 Compare especially the shadows of lampposts and telegraph poles on the walls of

Gruyaert’s buildings.

9 Email correspondence with artist, 2018. 10 To borrow the title of a sculpture by Marc Quinn. 11 Note the human figure in the distant background accidentally caught in the frame of

this picture.

12 To the children of Old Hill, the council estate was a no-go area, ‘beyond the

Thunderdome’ (Billingham 2018; see Chapter 1).

13 Juliana Engberg, in the same spirit, identifies Billingham’s townscapes as ‘hauntings of

place’ (2007).

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14 The Public developed out of the highly successful independent Jubilee Arts

programme which King set up.

15 Indeed, this crisis of artistic identity was one of the key motivations of the Ikon show. 16 Ray Billingham, incidentally, worked as a machine operator in one of the metal

fabrication industries in the region.

17 Purists consider the Black Country designation to pertain exclusively to the region

where the seam is visible through the surface of the landscape: West Bromwich, Oldbury, Blackheath, Cradley Heath, Old Hill, Bilson, Dudley, Tipton, Wednesfield and Halesowen, Wednesbury and Walsall.

18 Judas Priest hail from West Bromwich. 19 Social emancipation is a key subplot of the British New Wave and ‘Angry Young

Man’ realist text where the narrative impulse is often motivated by the protagonist’s existential desire to escape from the oppressive social atmosphere they have come to identify with their working-class habitus. For Higson and Lovell, in the films of the British New Wave, this desire is invoked in the lingering aesthetics of the landscape tableau (and its coincidence with the focalization of the protagonist induces a feeling for freedom in the spectator). Of course, this mythos of emancipation (and its underlying social assumptions) closely corresponds to the ‘rhetoric of escape’ we’ve seen Peddie critique with reference to Black Country metal culture.

20 As categorized in The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, Richard

Hoggart’s influential social typology, the emblem of social emancipation by education in the (so-called ‘angry young man’) classic social realist text is embodied in the role of the ‘scholarship boy’ (Hoggart [1957] 2009) which Lovell exemplifies with reference to a token from a long-running British soap opera: ‘the scholarship boy’, she writes, is ‘our Ken’, home from college and ‘looking with jaundiced eyes at the habits and practices of working-class life made strange’ (in Lovell 2006: 162).

21 He claims he’s never heard of it (Billingham, email conversation, 2019). 22 Robert Macfarlane (2015) in an article on the eeriness of the English landscape

(which we return to below) refers to Iranian novelist Reza Negarestani’s ‘weird’ Lovecraft-inspired description of underground oil as a ‘sentient entity’. Here the tenyard coal seam is like a sentient entity sleeping in the soil.

23 Admittedly, he may not, in this article, refer directly to the Hounds of Love, but this

album constructs spatial effects that strongly evoke the specifically English landscape eerie.

24 Billingham exhibited a suite of Constable-inspired landscape studies (taken with

35mm disposable cameras) in the Town Hall Galleries in Ipswich in 2007. See Moss (2007).

25 One significant (more recent) influence on Billingham’s approach to landscape is

Melissa Harrison’s novel At Hawthorn Time (2015). The character Jack (a vagrant ex-prisoner wandering through rural England whom Billingham refers to as a ‘green man’) in particular has had a profound effect on the artist. We discuss Harrison’s novel at length in interview (Billingham 2018).

26 Reviewing Matthew Murray’s photographs of Saddleworth Moor, Billingham makes

a comment that reveals something of his own approach to landscape. ‘For the artist’, he says, landscape ‘is like a large blank canvas on which to project ideas, emotions

NOTES    215

or attitudes’ (Billingham 2017a: np). This implies that he conceives the natural environment as a kind of ready-made resource for pictorial (and psychological) opportunity. 27 Crudely, the enactive approach to perceptual experience is a combination of the

ecological theory of perception and phenomenology (especially Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception [1962]).

28 A similar effect of perspective, arguably less dramatic, is seen in the diminishing road

to the horizon of Ethiopian Landscape (2002b).

29 When exhibited as autonomous works (i.e. not in the photobook) this connection

is clearer, as they are entitled Norfolk (Dyke) (2003) and Norfolk (Gate) (2002), respectively, and enlarged to 126 × 154 cm.

30 A similar effect is witnessed in Pond (2002) where a sliver of yellow illuminates the

horizon over the smiling ellipse of water.

31 This influence was reconfirmed in the 2012 Photographic Encounters exhibition at

the National Gallery where contemporary artists were invited to make interventions in the permanent collection, Billingham (one of three artists selected) opted to juxtapose his Hedgerow (New Forest) (2003) alongside The Cornfield (1826) to reveal its resonance with Constable’s painting.

32 Perceptual access to the landscape, like Billingham’s other images of the reclaimed

prairie-flat Norfolk countryside, is arrayed in formal strata (parallel to the picture plane). As deliberate a strategy as possible in straight photography, this articulation of space is informed by Appleton’s observation that ‘When environmental perception becomes organised into the sequential phases of a single purposeful operation, we call it exploration’ (1990: 27). Billingham now regards these landscape photos as early work; in his latest work, he tries to challenge or at least complicate categories such as horizontal access to the space of the scene (he avoids using paths for instance) (Billingham 2018). In panoramic photographs such as Untitled (2015) (as well as Birds [Panoramic Landscape] 2008 [Fig. 4.4]) the horizon is completely occluded by an entanglement of interlocking forms that results in an intense all-over flat surface reminiscent of the shallow matting of skeins in a Jackson Pollock action painting (see Number 1).

33 As well as Appleton, this aspect of Billingham’s approach to the landscape is

influenced by the phenomenological theory of landscape. See, for example, Tilley (1997).

34 The Wakelin Award is an annual prize for a Welsh artist facilitated by the Glynn

Vivian Gallery, Swansea. In 2018 it was awarded to Billingham (resident in Swansea) by sculptor Laura Ford. His latest monochrome landscape snapshots (which he characterizes as ‘sketches’) demonstrate the influence of Peter Henry Emerson’s atmospheric Victorian gothic photographs of East Anglia (c.1890). Employing unbranded used point-and-shoot cameras with plastic lenses, viewfinder, out-of-date film and mechanical pharmacy printing, he tries to obfuscate the Appleton categories by obscuring access to the horizon.

35 See William Poteat (2016). 36 Following Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodiment as the ground of experience,

Todes argues that the lived body’s structure and orientation determines the phenomenology not only of perceptual experience but of all consciously motivated activity (Todes 2001; Dreyfus 2003).

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37 Brief online interview with Billingham in connection with his 2015 Panoramic

exhibition at the Towner in Eastbourne posted by ccadmin: https://theoldreader. com/profile/398a16b5a7f7d684c4ab247b?page=5. First appeared in Culture Calling September 2015.

Chapter 5 1 Bacon is significant especially for the early stages of the project. Not specifically the

content of Bacon’s studies of apes and dogs but, more importantly, the compositional stratagem that posits the figure in a cage-like framework suggestive of the zoo enclosure. Perhaps Billingham has Bacon in mind when he describes the zoo project as ‘existential’ (2018). Having said this, it is worth comparing Gorilla (2005) and Baboons (2005) with Bacon’s Study of a Baboon (1953) and Chimpanzee (1955) (the painter possessed a text by V. J. Stanek called Introducing Monkeys which was discovered in his studio after his death covered with annotations and sketches) (Sylvester 2000: 209; Domino 1997:84-86).

2 First published as ‘Ape’s Eye View’ in the Telegraph Magazine, 8 August 1992, pp. 14–19. 3 Although it warrants further exploration, this chapter cannot pursue the affinities

of Muybridge and Billingham’s approaches to the zoo animal – especially the methodological relationship between the still and the moving image.

4 Peter James however does refer (fleetingly) to her work in his essay for Billingham’s

Zoo publication (2006: 123).

5 Personal conversation with the artist. She’s one of the few photographers he refers to

in connection with the zoo project. See interview with Giovanni Aloi (2008: 58).

6 She brings a classic aesthetic of clarity and detail to her pictures of the empty interiors

of public buildings that Billingham respects. Invariably, it is the cold ministerial environment that Höfer seeks, observing that the behavioural effects of public buildings are more conspicuous in the absence of people.

7 Heidegger’s argument is a lot more complex and involved than Gray suggests. It is

because animals lack what the philosopher refers to idiomatically as ‘World’ (Welt: briefly, existential access to the inheritance of meaning, the ability to perceive the things of the planet as such and such . . . objects of experience, as having, that is, a kind of significant presence that persists through time and our absence) (1995: 210). Heidegger writes: ‘When we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word “rock” in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock. . . . [W]hatever it is is not accessible to it as a being. The blade of grass that the beetle crawls up, for example, is not a blade of grass for it at all’ (1995: 198). My understanding of Heidegger’s attitude is reliant on Derrida’s commentary in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008: 141–60). For Heidegger, however, it is because non-human animals ‘are lodged in their . . . environment’ (248) that they lack language (and not the other way around). Nevertheless, his anthropic assumptions come to the fore when he claims things like the animal is ‘so alien’ and when he voices regret that the human shares ‘an abysmal bodily kinship with the beast’ (1998: 248).

NOTES    217

8 ‘Animal Magic: Richard Billingham QA,’ www​.c​​reati​​vetou​​rist.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/ar​​t​/uk/​​

anima​​l​-mag​​ic​-ri​​chard​​-bill​​ingha​​m​-qa/​

9 See Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008: 100–101) for an alternative

analysis of the Cartesian ‘anthropocentric prejudice’ and the heritage of the mastery over nature that extends from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

10 This inventory could, in principle, be extended to incorporate the low-income

housing project, the sink estate, the tower block, the retirement home, the Magdalene laundry and so on.

11 See interview with Aloi (2008): ‘I wanted to make images [in response to Berger’s

thesis] where the animals were much less incidental and in fact controlled the image compositionally, but were not sentimental in any way’ (2008: 59).

12 Gary Marvin’s text in Billingham’s Zoo publication ‘Acting the Part: Being a Zoo

Animal’ argues that zoos are environmental constructs whose closest relative is the theatre, ‘These habitat constructions’, he writes, are ‘theatrical constructions in which zoo animals stand for and perform the role of wild animal [. . .Thus] The zoo can be viewed as a theatre of inauthenticity (here) attempting to tell a story of authenticity (there)’ (2006: 119).

13 This interest in animals performing is a consistent theme in Billingham’s work. The

photo of the cat on the windowsill in Ray’s a Laugh #31 which the artist describes as an image of an animal performing as if on stage (à la Sickert’s music hall paintings) (Billingham 2018).

14 An optical illusion dispelled by the trees visible above the enclosure. Incidentally,

the habitat of Mandrill baboons is the equatorial rain forests of Africa (and not the savanna).

15 Email conversation with the artist, 2018. 16 There’s another photo of the bear pit that does include the animal at the centre of the

composition (it isn’t published in Zoo). See interview with Aloi Antennae (2008: 60).

17 The stuffed animal toy in the background of NRAL 1995 (cover image) deputizes in

this photo as an absurd substitute for the averted gazes (the dog on the bed with its back to the picture).

18 Searle indicates the affinities between Billingham’s zoo project and Bacon’s animal

studies. Yet this is precisely the zone where their treatment of animals deviates, namely, apropos the problem of the face. Deleuze’s analysis of the question of animality in Bacon, in fact, focuses on the problem of the face. Commenting on the ‘dismantling’ of the face in Bacon’s paintings, the focus is transferred to the ‘head’ as ‘meat’: the ‘common fact’ of man and animal. The face has ‘lost its form’ through techniques of ‘rubbing and brushing’ and a blunt, expressionless head appears in its place. And with this appearance of the head, he goes on, emerges that ‘zone of indiscernibility’ between animal and human existence characteristic of Bacon’s aesthetic (Deleuze 2003: 21): ‘it is’, he says, ‘a deep identity . . . more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man’ (2003: 25).

19 This convulsive effect is again similar to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Brontosaurus (1995). 20 Personal conversation with artist, 2018. Billingham arranged to have his parents

rehoused in the maisonette around 2000 (Fullerton 2016b). Ray’s care home was in Trinity Street.

218   N OTES

21 The artist’s mother is seen meditatively leafing through these photo albums in a scene

of Fishtank (1998).

22 His mother, he says, used 110 and 126 film which gives the pictures a certain look, an

effect he wanted to motivate in a knowing way to refer to the naïve unawareness of the animal’s predicament (Billingham in MacDonald 2007).

23 Matthew Ryan Smith (2014a; 2014b), for instance, discusses Billingham’s work

with reference to trauma and cites Ray’s a Laugh as a key example of an instance where empathic responses to the mediation of traumatic experience depend on acknowledging behavioural criteria for the ‘presence’ of ‘pain and suffering’ (perceived in Billingham’s photographs that show his parents’ physical ‘movements, gestures, and expressions’) (2014a: 10). It is in fact these criterial physiological expressions of psycho-physical suffering, he maintains, that ultimately elicit the morally important ‘strong feelings of empathy’ in viewers of Billingham’s photography and not any notion of shared social background (2014a: 10). This approach seems motivated to avoid having to read the work as social critique.

24 Personal conversation with artist, 2018. 25 A phrase borrowed from John Banville (1993).

Chapter 6 1 The artist was nominated for a BAFTA award (Outstanding Debut for British Writer,

Director or Producer) for Ray & Liz in 2019. The accolade was awarded to Michael Pearce for Beast (2018). Ray & Liz won the best Debut in the British Independent Film Awards.

2 The casting (by Shaheen Baig) Billingham admits, was the most difficult part of

the process (2019; Green 2019). International Film Festival, Dublin 28 February 2019.

3 Channel 4 documentary series Benefits Street, first broadcast in January 2014, ran

for two seasons of five episodes and centred on the residents of James Turner Street in Winson Green (Birmingham), a disproportionate percentage of which subsist on social welfare (see Introduction).

4 I discussed this film installation in 2015 in public conversation with the artist

(with reference to my existential-absurdist ‘Figure in a Room’ interpretation) at the ‘Revising History’ Conference in the University of Gloucestershire and following its screening at the Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham (Bowden 2015).

5 Notable exceptions include Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993) featuring Karl

Johnson as the eponymous philosopher (and Michael Gough as Bertrand Russell) and John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil (1998) with Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon and Daniel Craig as George Dyer.

6 Billingham (2017b). 7 As can be verified from the portrait photograph accompanying Nick Hornby’s essay

on Sensation in Writers on Art (Hornby 2001).

8 The photograph that features in Ray’s a Laugh would have been taken later in real

time (c. 1994, i.e. seven years later).

NOTES    219

9 Ray (2015/6) focuses exclusively on his father’s withdrawal and was ultimately assimilated

into the full-length feature in the form of an encompassing framing narrative.

10 It needs to be clarified that the flat where the family lived initially (in which Ray

remained when Jason was taken into care and Liz moved out) was located on the eleventh floor of Addenbrooke Court (Anon. 2000). Liz’s flat was located on the seventh floor of Wesley Court (Chesshyre 2001), a neighbouring block, into which, in 1992, Ray moved back to his wife. This is the flat familiar from Ray’s a Laugh, Sensation, Fishtank and the Ikon exhibition catalogue.

11 Scenes in this part of the film, he adds, were determined by what the artist calls the

‘spatial dynamics’ of the interior set: ‘I had the idea that each shot would respond to the room’s special [sic] dynamics and out of that the film would emerge’ (Billingham 2017b).

12 3:4 aspect ratio re-emphasizes the sense of (zoological?) enclosure. Indicating its

affinity with the vintage TV screen (and the window frame) the director also claims that he opted for the Academy ratio because it enables a pictorial concentration on ‘objects in space . . . and heads’ (Billingham, 2019, Dublin International Film Festival) (O’Callaghan 2019).

13 This shot alludes to a specific black-and-white photograph of his father in bed taken

in 1990 (Fig. 1.4). See Chapter 1.

14 ‘As long as Sid cashes me dole and brings me that homebrew’, Ray says to his wife in a

scene towards the end of the film, ‘I’m happy as a . . . pig in shit!’

15 He replies to his wife’s accusations above by reassuring her that he’s quite content

(see above).

16 This scene of sleeping recalls Bill Viola’s absorptive video films, especially The Passing

(1991) with its lyrical use of very slow-moving, painterly, indistinct footage to suggest dream-states. It’s also influenced by a scene from Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), where a similar cut takes us from a panoramic night-time scene of London and tracks back through the window to Louise lying on her bed in the dark.

17 ‘A photograph’s punctum’, Barthes maintains, ‘is that accident which pricks me (but

also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (2000: 27). More enigmatic than the key perhaps is the rim of a glass (?) inscribed into the image – a white Baconian ellipsis indicating a restless circular movement – at Ray’s right hand.

18 For instance, The Room, The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter and the Birthday Party in

Pinter (1996).

19 On the influence of Beckett, Billingham attended Les Blair’s staging of Waiting for

Godot – with the late Rik Mayall as Vladimir and Adrian Edmondson as Estragon – in the Queen’s Theatre in London in 1991 (in conversation 2018). I explore the connections between the theatre of the absurd and Billingham’s film Ray more comprehensively in an earlier publication (Cashell 2017).

20 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent souffle où il veut (Bresson 1956), set in

Lyon during the German occupation, is based on the memoir of Resistance-member André Devigny’s jailbreak from Montluc Prison where he was interned by the Nazis and sentenced to death in 1943.

21 Where the remembering protagonist is confined to a hospital bed. The interior

construct also recalls Winston Smith (John Hurt) in his dismal spartan cell in Michael Radford’s film of Orwell’s 1984 (Radford 1984).

220   N OTES

22 A recent study of neo-Romanticist tropes in realist cinema – especially with reference

to landscape scenery – refers to the ‘motif of the window’ in films such as Ratcatcher (Ramsay 1999) and Sweet Sixteen (Loach 2002), some of which include ‘a gazing figure’ at the window, and which, the author suggests, signifies the ‘longing to escape confinement’ (Andrews in Hockenhull 2014: 66–7). Specifically, the window brings the ‘confinement of an interior into the most immediate contrast with the immensity of the space outside’ (2014: 67). For Ray, however, the window represents a shield as well as a ‘threshold’. His escape is fantasy: to this extent the window is a screen that facilitates elicitation of memories.

23 In one memorable moment, Lol necks a random bottle of spirits from the crate and

his big head bobs down to reveal Constable’s Haywain (1821) on the wall. The camera adjusts the focus to frame the poster (appreciatively) in the shot.

24 A song, incidentally, that lead-singer of the band, Siouxsie Sioux, revealed was about

domestic abuse (Sioux 2018). Billingham insisted to me that the song’s function is simply to establish period context (it was the first single released from the band’s 1980 studio album Kaleidoscope). Used in the promotional trailer, serendipitously, the Banshees’ song became the film’s signature track.

25 Ray was 19 years older than Liz. 26 The Grandmother’s house is coded as a religious environment with icons of the Sacred

Heart on walls and mantel to which Rich has been dispatched to fetch Uncle Lol for sitting duty. Their journey back to Sidaway Street (Richard leading the apprehensive ‘saft Lawrence’ through the intimidating backstreets) passes through many zones and locations familiar from the Black Country series of diurnal photos (1997). The kids playing in the street in this scene, incidentally, are the artist’s own children.

27 Billingham was living with Ray during this period but denies that these scenes are

meant to evoke the presence of an observer (in conversation, 2015). He later revealed, however, that the room is set up specifically to suggest that there’s another person looking at Ray.

28 The first time, incidentally, that the council flats appear in Billingham’s oeuvre. 29 Jason Billingham now lives in Birmingham where he works as a road drainage

surveyor mapping flooding on motorways (Billingham 2019).

30 Billingham wanted American Werewolf in London (Landis 1981) ‘a real period piece’

for this scene but couldn’t secure the rights. ‘Children of the Corn sort of works as well, I think it matches the wallpaper’ (in Benbow 2019).

31 Yet, even more complexly, the episodes are restructured in the film to cohere with the

conventions of cinematic semiotics in order to suggest the vantage point of the father reminiscing in his bedroom.

32 Other examples include Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay 1999) and Sweet Sixteen (Ken

Loach 2002).

33 Billingham, Dublin premiere of Ray & Liz (2019).

Conclusion 1 Although Davies is careful about distinguishing his work from the Kitchen Sink

tradition, he admits that A Taste of Honey (Richardson 1961) ‘looked authentic at the

NOTES    221

time’ (in Dixon 1994: 252). Now, however, the film appears ersatz. ‘These films started out as plays, plays or novels, and they were made into films, shot on real locations, with people doing proper accents for that particular part of Manchester, or whatever, and that was a revelation’ (1994: 252). ‘But you look at them now, and you realise how contrived they are’ (1994: 252). ‘The films of the late fifties and early sixties, which are now called “Kitchen Sink”, did seem rather revolutionary. But if you look at them now, you realise they are drawn from the middle class point of view. And they’re relentlessly dreary. Those constant shots of canals with stuff floating in them. Working-class life was difficult, but it had great beauty and depth and warmth’ (1994: 253). 2 Davies uses this for atmosphere and nostalgia; he regards the shipping forecast as a

‘mantra’ (in Everett 2004: 66), ‘It was like magic,’ he says, ‘I didn’t understand what it meant – I still don’t – so it was like a kind of ritual, an incantation’ (Floyd 1988 in Everett 2004: 66). It has the same function in Billingham’s film with the added realist element of his father, looking out the window across the Black Country, listening to the radio for company.

3 He discusses his preference for the four-second dissolve in conversation with Melvyn

Bragg, he’s fascinated by the mnemonic character of the lap, superimposed over another image layer: ‘you see [the almost transparent image] for a moment . . . then it vanishes.’

4 Salinger hasn’t quite captured Ray’s worried expression in the original photo

which first appeared in Fishtank when Liz is leafing through her photograph album (see Fig. 3.7).

5 In Ray this is an actual archive photo of his brother. 6 Closely identified with the legacy of John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings’s

documentary movement, the austere, archetypical grim authenticity associated with British social realist cinema was developed as the antithesis of Hollywood’s superficial aesthetics of spectacular illusion (stylization, glamour, the star-system) (Lay 2002: 102; Barnouw 1993).

7 In a similar mode to the resurgence of the realist Nouvelle Vague style in certain

French movies of the 1990s.

8 For analysis of the genre continuity and specific differences, see Hill (2000). 9 The acclaimed films by Ken Loach, I, Daniel Blake (Loach 2016) and Sorry We Missed

You (2019) carry this neorealist tradition forward, adapting the formula to a critique of austerity and the gig-economy respectively.

10 Because it documents this exact change, Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff

– a cultural phenomenon that takes place in the precise intersectional space of the ‘delicate ecology’ of British realist television and cinema – represents a paradigmatic, apocalyptic moment in British realism: the emergence of the disenfranchised, disaffected, misanthropic male protagonist. Each episode of Bleasdale’s cycle of short dramas focuses on the personal (social-existential) struggle of a singular character, isolated in their peculiar predicament – indeed the most dramatic turning point – in the evolution of British social realism is the iconic anti-hero Yosser Hughes (surely a prototype for David Thewlis’s Johnny Fletcher in Mike Leigh’s Naked) for Yosser personifies this socio-economic ideological mutation. However, more important in Billingham’s case is Chrissie’s Story because of the more subtly corrosive domestic narrative at its core.

222   N OTES

11 Although admitting that he is a product of neglect, Billingham rejects the label of

dysfunctionality in application to his family. And I strongly believe it is important to respect this.

12 Produced by Luc Besson, Nil by Mouth is a British-French collaborative production. 13 See Purcell (2001) on the specific representation of social class in Nil by Mouth. 14 The film, Lay suggests, ‘could almost be considered therapy for Oldman’ (2002: 111). 15 Strangely (unlike Billingham’s film) no direct self-representation appears in Oldman’s

debut. Absence of the actor’s surrogate is surely one of this film’s most intriguing aspects. Yet the director’s presence remains weirdly perceptible behind the camera, where he seems to cower – a speculative and ambiguous observing presence – in the spatial penumbra of every scene. To obtain a sense of what the young Gary Oldman might have been like however – to compensate for his conspicuous absence in Nil by Mouth – the film should be viewed in conjunction with Mike Leigh’s Thatcherera East-End council-estate film Meantime (Leigh 1983) in which Oldman plays disaffected, attention-deficit skin, Coxy.

16 She does worry, in a footnote, that Oldman’s star-status might be regarded as

compromising his working-class filmmaker ‘credentials’ (Lay 2002: 126).

17 In the ugly wife-beating scene very little is perceivable apart from Ray’s vigorous

work-out of kicks and stomps behind the kitchen partition.

18 Clandestine autobiographic elements subtly incorporated into the mise en scène

provide contextual, highly revealing, and borderline-confessional hints of the director’s existential investment in the film. These elements include, for instance, the fact that the materfamilias, Janet – the most stable character in the film – is played by Oldman’s actual older sister Maureen under the stage-name Laila Morse (recognizable for her long-term role of maternal Mo Harris in British soap EastEnders). Also: in the pub scene, when elderly Kath sings (the Oscar Hammerstein Show Boat song) ‘Can’t Help Lovin Dat Man’, the singing voice of the director’s 75-year-old mother (Kathleen Oldman) is dubbed over actress Edna Doré’s lip-synch vocals. Finally, Ray’s armchair (in the film) was Oldman’s actual father’s habitual ‘drinking chair’ (references are made to his father’s chair in the key confessional scene of the film). Apparently, the director ‘volunteered’ these existential details to Roger Ebert following the emotive screening of Nil by Mouth at Cannes in 1997 (Ebert 1998).

19 He characterizes the failure of tragedy (as the ‘Modernist quandary’) thus, ‘I want

the transcendental tragic moment, but I can’t believe in tragedy anymore’ (in Trocchi 1960: x).

20 ‘I took the baby to see Ray recently in the nursing home,’ Billingham commented of

the intentionality of this image in a 2007 interview, ‘because he might die soon. . . . I wanted to be able to show Walter [Richard’s son] in the future that I took him to see Ray before he died’ (in MacDonald 2007). Ray died very soon after this.

NOTES    223

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FILMOGRAPHY

1984 (1984), Dir. Michael Radford, UK: Virgin Films. 28 Days Later . . . (2002), Dir. Danny Boyle, UK: DNA Films. A Field in England (2013), Dir. Ben Wheatley, UK: Film Four / Rook Films. A Journey to Avebury (1971) Short, Dir. Derek Jarman, UK: Independent. A Man Escaped (1956), Dir. Robert Bresson, France: Gaumont / Nouvelles Editions de Films. A Taste of Honey (1961), Dir. Tony Richardson, UK: Woodfall Film Productions. American Werewolf in London (1981), Dir. John Landis, US: PolyGram Pictures. Artshock: Is Bad Art for Bad People? Dir. Jake Chapman, UK: Channel 4 Productions. Artsnight (2015), Episode 1, curated by Maxine Peake C. Tavernor (director) BBC2 6 March. Benefits Street (2014), (TV programme) Channel Four Productions. Big Brother (2000–18), (TV Programme) Channel Four. Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), Dir. Alan Bleasdale, Birmingham: BBC. Celebrity Big Brother (2015), (TV Programme) Channel Four. Children of the Corn (1984), Dir. Frank Kiersch, US: Hal Roach Studios / New World Pictures / Angeles Entertainment Industries. Chinatown (1974), Dir. Roman Polanski, US: Paramount Penthouse / Long Road / Robert Evans. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Dir. Terence Davies, UK: British Film Institute / Channel Four Films. Fishtank (1998), Dir. Richard Billingham, UK: Artangel / BBC2 / Adam Curtis and James Lingwood. The Grass Arena (1992), Dir. Gillies MacKinnon, UK: BBC. I Daniel Blake (2016), Dir. Ken Loach, UK, France: Sixteen Tyne Ltd., Why Not Productions, BBC, France 2 Cinema and BFI. Kes (1969), Dir. Ken Loach, UK: Woodfall United Artists. Look Back in Anger (1958), Dir. Tony Richardson, UK: Woodfall Film Productions. Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Dir. John Maybury, UK: BBC Films / BFI / Arts Council of England. Meantime (1983), Dir. Mike Leigh, UK: Central Television Channel 4. Naked (1993), Dir. Mike Leigh, UK: Thin Man First Independent Films. Nil by Mouth (1997), Dir. Gary Oldman, UK / France: SE8 Group / EuropaCorp On Vanishing Land (2013), Dir. Mark Fisher and J. Barton, UK. Ratcatcher (1999), Dir. Lynne Ramsay UK: Pathe Pictures, BBC Films, Arts Council of England.

Ray (2015), 16mm 33m, Dir. Richard Billingham, UK: produced Jacqui Davies DoP Daniel Landin. Ray & Liz (2018), Dir. Richard Billingham, UK: Jacqui Davies in association with Severn Screen. Riff-Raff (1991), Dir. Ken Loach, UK: Parallax Pictures Film Four. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Dir. Karel Reisz, UK: Woodfall Film Productions. Seven (1995), Dir. David Fincher, US: New Line Cinema. Sexy Beast (2000), Dir. Jonathan Glazer, UK: Recorded Picture Company / Film Four / Chronopolis Films. South Bank Show Specials (1988), Melvyn Bragg and Francis Bacon, UK: Directors Cut Productions, 9 June LWT (ITV London). South Bank Show Specials (1992), Dir. Steve Jenkins, UK Melvyn Bragg and Terence Davies, UK: Directors Cut Productions, 5 April LWT (ITV London). Sweet Sixteen (2002), Dir. Ken Loach, UK: BBC Films Icon Film Distribution. Terence Davies Trilogy (1984): Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), Death and Transfiguration (1983), Dir. Terence Davies, UK: British Film Institute. The Blair Witch Project (1999), Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, US: Haxan Films. The Family (1974), Dir. Franc Roddam (TV programme) BBC. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), Dir. Tony Richardson, UK: Woodfall Film Productions. The Saatchi Gallery 100 (2000), DVD, UK: Illuminations. The Singing Detective (1986), (TV programme) Dir. Dennis Potter, UK: BBC TV& ABC Australia. This Is England (2006), Dir. Shane Meadows, UK: Warp Films, Big Arty Productions, EM Media. This Sporting Life (1963), Dir. Lyndsay Anderson, UK: Independent Artists Julian Wyntle / Lesley Parkyn Productions. Three Colours: Blue (1993), Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, France: MK2 Productions / CED Productions / France 3 Cinema / CAB Productions. Trainspotting (1996), Dir. Danny Boyle UK: Film Four. Two Years at Sea (2011), Dir. Ben Rivers, UK: Independent. Under the Skin (2013), Dir. Jonathan Glazer, UK: Film Four / British Film Institute / Silver Reel. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Dir. Lasse Hallström, US: Paramount Pictures. Wittgenstein (1993), Dir. Derek Jarman, UK: BFI Production / Bandung Production / Film Four.

FILMOGRAPHY    237

INDEX

28 Days Later … (2002)  104 absorption  56, 82–6 Adams, Brooks  5 Adams, Tim  13, 134, 185 Addenbrooke Court  25, 46, 167, 179, 220 Adorno, Theodor  117 alt-Romanticism  116, 128 Anderson, Lindsay  203, 209 Andrews, Michael  3, 70, 82, 221 Antelope St. Louis (1998)  141 Apes of London Zoo (1994)  17, 136 Appleton, Jay  119–26, 216, 217 Approaching a City (1946)  107 Arbus, Diane  16, 54, 82 Armstrong, David  5 Arnold, Andrea  65 Artangel  5, 88, 92, 212 Artaud, Antonin  19, 27, 87, 168 Artist | Animal  140 The Art of Tracey Emin (2002)  2 Ashton, Richard  163, 169 Atget, Eugene  7, 103, 111 At Hawthorn Time (2015)  115, 216 Auerbach, Frank  3, 39, 204 Bacon, Francis  3, 21, 38–40, 59, 64, 86–7, 134, 147, 166, 170, 203, 204, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220 Baig-Clifford, Yasmeen  152, 157 Baker, Shirley  1, 19 Baker, Steve  140, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail  82 Banville, John  160, 219n

Baraitser, Lisa  48, 60, 85 Barbican Gallery, London  4, 15, 16, 17, 73, 78, 136, 206 Barthes, Roland  58, 60, 83, 170, 190, 220 Barton, Justin  115 Bashir, Martin  6 BBC  5, 6, 50, 88, 204, 205 Beach in Karachi (2001)  122 Bear Pit (2006)  147–8 Beaux Arts Quartet  203 Becher, Bernd  142 Becher, Hilla  142 Beckett, Samuel  19–21, 50, 171, 173, 176, 208, 213, 220 ‘Beezley Street’ 15, 205 Benefits Street  11–13, 162, 205, 219 Benjamin, Walter  83, 102, 110, 111, 214 Bereavement (1970)  38 Berger, John  134–6, 137, 142–9, 151, 156, 218 Berleant, Arnold  121, 126–7 Big Brother / Celebrity Big Brother  6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 162 Billingham, Elizabeth (1950–2006)  22, passim Billingham, Jason (1977)  25, passim Billingham, Lawrence (Uncle Lol)  43, 45, 106, 163, 172–6, 180–81, 190, 221 Billingham, Raymond (1931–2007)  22–3, passim Binoche, Juliette  10 Birds (Panoramic Landscape) (2008)  117 Black Country  7, 12, 24, 101–14, 115, 116, 124, 129, 130, 134, 159, 172, 173, 180–1, 183, 187, 194, 215, 221, 222

black-magic realism  65–6 The Blair Witch Project (1999)  7 Blake, William  8, 68, 71, 110 Bleasdale, Alan  4, 65, 222 Blossfeldt, Karl  140 Bomberg, David  204 Bonnard, Pierre  29 Bossé, Laurence  73 Bournville School of Art, Birmingham  4, 19, 22, 25, 29, 35 Boyle, Danny  4, 50, 64, 65, 67, 104 Bradley, Dai  180 Brandt, Bill  1, 19–20, 103, 107, 206 Bratby, John  3, 203 Bresson, Robert  171, 172, 220 British New Wave Cinema  51, 52, 188, 194, 197, 198, 203, 209, 210, 213, 215 Brooklyn Museum of Art  5, 76 Brown, Carol  15 Bulger, James  6 Burlington House  75, 78, 211 Burra, Edward  111, 115, 130 The Burren (2001)  127 Bush, Kate  115, 215 Cain’s Book (1960)  58, 98 The Camden Town Murder, or, What Shall We Do for the Rent? (1908)  33, 34, 208 Canning, Claire  2 Capa, Cornell  48, 80 Captive Beauty (2004)  141 Cartier-Bresson, Henri  41, 68 Caton-Jones, Michael  208 Cavell, Stanley  159 Channel 4  6, 7, 11, 162, 205, 212, 219 Chapman Brothers (Jake and Dinos)  74, 77, 203, 210, 211 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon  84 Chevallier, Florence  16 Children of the Corn (1984)  180, 221 Chimpanzee (2006)  151–3 Chinatown (1974)  213 Clark, T. J.  83 Clarke, Alan  195 Clarke, John Cooper  205 Cliffs (2001)  121 Cloud Break (2001)  125 Cockroaches (2005)  147

Collins, Michael  4, 17, 35, 37, 44–9, 136, 206, 208 Collishaw, Mat  203, 210 Colomb, Denise  19 Compton Verney Gallery  137, 152, 153 Constable, John  8, 116–17, 125, 126–7, 128, 130, 216, 221 Cork, Richard  14, 52, 53, 98, 200 The Cornfield (1826)  126 Coronation Street  205, 209 Cotton, Charlotte  37, 47, 49, 54, 55, 203, 204, 208, 210 Courbet, Gustave  33 Cows in the Rain (2003)  127–8 Cradley Heath, West Midlands  4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 22, 24, 25, 37, 51, 52, 82, 88, 102–16, 133, 159, 167, 181, 204, 214, 215 Creed, Martin  102, 214 Crewdson, Gregory  110 Curtis, Adam  5, 88, 92, 212 Curtis, Edward  16 Dalí, Salvador  51, 59, 86 Damaged Romanticism (Houston, 2008)  128, 129 Dark  140 Dave, Paul  52, 65–6, 79–80, 195, 198, 199, 212 Davies, Jacqui  12, 205 Davies, Terence  4, 13–14, 89, 93, 97–9 Dead Dad (1996/7)  77 Death of Chatterton (1856)  174, 175 De Caprio, Leonardo  208 decisive / indecisive moment  41, 46, 68, 103, 161 Dedham Vale  116 Deer (2006)  145 Degas, Edgar  29, 30, 32–3, 35 Delaney, Shelagh  52, 67, 70, 203, 205, 209 Deleuze, Gilles  21–2, 218 Derrida, Jacques  137, 138, 148, 150–3, 218 Di Corcia, Philip-Lorca  5 Dijkstra, Rineke  5 Dimmock, Emily  34, 207 Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)  4, 172, 188, 190–1

I ndex   239

Doron, Gil  107 Dreyfus, Hubert  131, 217 Dubliners (1914)  32 Dudley  156 Dudley Zoo  156, 165, 179, 213 Dyer, George  206, 219 Dyer, Richard  168 eerie  8, 102, 112–14, 124–6, 128–32 Eggleston, William  102 Eh Joe (1967)  171 Emin, Tracey  2, 7, 73, 77, 161, 203, 204, 210 Endgame (1957)  208 Engberg, Juliana  5, 8, 104, 110, 159, 215 epiphany  32, 35, 40–1, 56, 117, 118, 152, 156, 198, 207 Ethiopian Landscape (2002a)  121 Ethiopian Landscape (2002b)  121 Everett, Wendy  13, 14, 89, 172, 188–92, 213, 222 Exley, Roy  104 the eye of the animal  141, 143–9, 153 Faigenbaum, Patrick  5 The Fall  43, 71 Farewell to Bosnia (1993)  46 Fence (2001)  121, 124 A Field in England (2013)  115 Fincher, David  168 Fisher, Mark  12, 15, 70–1, 113–15, 193, 205, 211 Fishtank (1998)  5, 7, 63, 73, 87, 88–100, 102, 138, 162, 170, 185, 187, 196, 199, 204, 212, 219, 220, 222 Foster, Hal  210 Frank, Robert  1, 46, 49, 203 Freeze (1988)  73 Freud, Lucian  3, 86–7, 98–9, 209 Freud, Sigmund  192–3 Fried, Michael  84–5 Fry, Roger  32, 33, 207 Fuller, Peter  3, 4, 39, 203, 204 Fullerton, Elizabeth  5, 169, 204 Gardner, Colin  2, 69, 103, 104, 110, 111, 128, 129, 130 Germain, Julian  3, 4, 35, 43–6, 48–9, 80, 208, 213 Ghost (1968)  111

240   Index

Ghost (1990)  77 Gibson, James  120 Gibson, Ralph  111 Gilman, Harold  2, 29 Gilmore, Mikal  48 Girl with White Dog (1950–51)  87 Goldberg, Jim  46 Goldin, Nan  2, 5, 45, 46, 67, 94, 203, 210 Goldsmiths College, London  73, 211 Goodall, Jane  135, 141 Gordon, Douglas  161 Gore, Spenser  2, 29 Gorilla (2005)  139, 147 Guomundsdottir, Björk  90 The Gower Peninsula  117, 130 Goya, Fransisco  81, 82 Graham, Paul  1, 19, 46, 73, 206 The Grass Arena (1988)  48, 213 Greaves, Derrick  203 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste  84 Gruyaert, Harry  103, 214 Gursky, Andreas  110 Hallström, Lasse  53 Hamburg I (1990)  142 Hansen, Rikke  10, 135, 137–9, 141, 142, 152, 160 Harrison, Melissa  115, 216 Harvey, Marcus  74, 75, 77, 203, 210, 211 Harvey, P. J.  115 The Haywain (1821)  221 Hatherley, Owen  79 hazard  122–5 Healy, John  48, 213 Hedge (2001)  124 Heidegger, Martin  118, 132, 142, 149, 153, 217, 218 Heimat  158, 159 Hellebrand, Nancy  1, 19 Higson, Andrew  51, 52, 80, 209, 210, 215 Hines, Barry  180 Hirsch, Marianne  156 Hirst, Damien  74, 77, 78, 203, 210 Hirst, Tony  205 Hockenhull, Stella  112, 124, 128, 129, 173, 191, 221 Hockney, David  128, 130, 212 Höfer, Candida  142, 148, 217 Hoggart, Richard  109, 197, 215

Hokusai  107 Holsworth, Hans Werner  208 Hoole, John  15 Hopper, Edward  19, 104, 106, 107 Hornby, Nick  56, 77, 78, 95, 209, 220 Horsfield, Craigie  5 Human Toilet (1997)  64 Hume, Gary  74 Husserl, Edmund  122 I Am a Camera (2000)  149 Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art (2005)  129 Identical Twins, Roselle NJ (1967)  54 Ikon Gallery, Birmingham  14, 101, 209 I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996)  45–6 Images à la Sauvette (1952)  41 intertextuality  82, 213 intratextuality  165, 187, 190 Is Suicide Genetic? (1996)  64 Jackson, Kevin  1 James, M. R.  114, 124 James, Peter  136, 139, 217 Jarman, Derek  97, 115, 189, 219 Jaschinski, Britta  140, 141, 152 Jones, Owen  12, 79 Jason, Walter and Ray (2006)  199–200 Joyce, James  32, 40, 56, 131, 207 Karlsruhe Zoo I (1992)  142 Kea (2005)  138 Keller, Walter  45, 46, 49, 208 Kelly, Deirdre (White Dee)  11, 12, 162–3, 169, 177 Kes (1969)  4, 180, 186 Kestrel for a Knave, A (1968)  180 Kiersch, Fritz  180 Kieślowski, Krzysztof  10, 96 Killip, Chris  1, 19 King, Stephen  180 Kitchen Sink (cinema)  4, 9, 52, 66, 203, 209, 212, 222 Kitchen Sink (painters)  3, 6, 64, 77, 203 Kossoff, Leon  3 Krapp’s Last Tape (1959)  20, 171, 176 Krauss, Rosalind  11 Kristeva, Julia  82–3 Kundera, Milan  97, 213

Lacan, Jacques  69, 210 L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909)  32 La Hollandaise (c.1906)  33 Lambri, Luisa  104 Landin, Daniel  164, 205 Lane, Abigail  74 Lardinois, Brigitte  15 Larkin, Philip  50, 210 Lassaly, Walter  210 Lay, Samantha  7, 13, 67, 76, 96–8, 185–6, 194–8, 211, 222, 223 Lazic, Elena  176, 187, 189, 191 Le Buveur d’Absinthe (1859) Manet  20 Leiris, Michael  10 Lessore, Helen  203 Levinas, Emmanuel  96, 151–3, 213 Lewis, Jim  68, 69, 70, 88 Liebmann, Lisa  5, 67, 94 Life / Live (1996)  9, 73 Lingwood, James  3, 5, 22, 26, 27, 37–8, 47, 58, 69, 85, 88, 89, 166, 203, 204, 212 Lion (2005)  145 Lipper, Susan  16 Lippit, Akira  146 Liz Smoking (1998)  102, 161 Loach, Ken  4, 65, 180, 186, 195, 221, 222 Lowry, L. S.  104, 130 Lucas, Sarah  64, 74, 77, 203, 204, 210, 211 Lying Figure (1969)  86 McCarthy, Thomas  10, 58, 69, 98, 99, 199 McCullin, Don  1 McDowell, John  120 Macfarlane, Robert  112, 115, 215 McQueen, Steve  161 Malamud, Randy  140 Maloney, Martin  82, 95 Manchester, Elizabeth  203 Mandrills (2005)  146–7 Manet, Edouard  20, 31, 83, 206 Mann, Sally  15 Mantegna, Andrea  32 A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over (1952)  70 Maybury, John  219 Meadows, Daniel  1, 19

I ndex   241

Meadows, Shane  65, 186, 204 Merck, Mandy  2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  122 Michailov, Boris  46 Middleditch, Edward  203 Millar, Jeremy  115 Millard-Lloyd, Joshua  165, 178, 185 Minton, John  112 Moran, Dermott  122 Mornington Crescent Nude (c.1907)  33 Mountains (2001)  121 Mount Fuji  107 Muddy Path (2001)  121 Mueck, Ron  77 Mullan, Peter  65, 195, 204 Murphy, Stephen  73 Murray, Matthew  118, 216 Muybridge, Eduard  139, 140, 217 Nadar  16 Nash, John  130 Nash, Paul  115 Negarestani, Reza  215 Neve, Christopher  104, 112, 115, 129, 214 Nicholson, Ben  115 Nicholson, Jack  213 Nil by Mouth (1997)  4, 80, 196–200, 201 nocturamas  109–14, 115, 133, 180 Noë, Alva  120 Noelker, Frank  141 Norfolk fens  8, 116, 124–5, 130 Norfolk Landscape (2002)  127 Norfolk Landscape (Dyke) (2003)  124-5 Norfolk Landscape (Gates) (2002)  125-6 Norham Castle, Sunrise (1835–40)  128 NRAL (1994)  81 NRAL (1995)  200 NRAL (1995)  86 NRAL (1996)  86 Nuit d’ete (c.1906)  7, 33 Obrist, Hans Ulrich  9, 73, 211 Ofili, Chris  74 Oldman, Gary  4, 67, 80, 185, 196–200, 209, 223 Olympia (1863)  83 O’Neill, David  54 On Vanishing Land (2013)  115

242   Index

Orangutan (2006)  145, 146 Osborne, John  203, 209 Painter Working, Reflection (1993)  87 Panda (2005)  145 Panorama (BBC 1 1995)  6 Parr, Martin  15, 16, 19, 66, 206, 208 pathetic fallacy  130 Pattison, Keith  1, 19 Peake, Maxine  205 Peiffer, Prudence  102 Peress, Gilles  46 Philadelphia Zoo  139 photographic realism  4, 13–14, passim Picasso, Pablo  82 Piersen, Jack  5 Place de l’Europe (1932)  68 Playstation (1999)  102, 161 Pluto and the Bateman Sisters (1996)  87 Polanski, Roman  213 Polar Bear (2001–6)  147 Polar Bear (2005)  160 Polar Bear, Germany (2000)  141 Pollock, Jackson  216 Pond (2002)  125 Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1969)  86 Portrait of Mother (1924)  55, 213 post-documentary  1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 56, 80, 88, 161, 164 Potter, Dennis  172 Prendeville, Brendan  33, 34, 87, 99 Prince, Richard  46 prospect  122–6, 132 punctum  170, 220 Quinn, Marc  74, 77, 211, 214 Rainer, Arnulf  38 Ramsay, Lynne  65, 195, 204, 220, 221 Ravilious, Eric  130 Ray (2015/6)  10, 172, 192, 220 Ray, Ted  50 Ray & Liz (2018)  4, 10–14, 46, 161–98 Ray in Bed (1999)  14, 102, 161 Ray’s a Laugh (1996)  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 26, 43–71, 73, 78, 86, 88, 89, 102, 109, 116, 148, 161, 164–7, 170, 182, 186, 187, 191, 196, 199, 200, 203, 205, 208, 210, 212, 213, 218–20

Reading Zoos (1998)  140 reality TV  5, 7, 13, 88 refuge  122–5, 168 Reid Banks, Lynne  203 Reisz, Karel  65, 203, 209 Remes, Outi  1, 5, 6, 13, 56, 80, 81, 204, 212 Reynolds, Anthony  55, 73, 101, 133, 206, 211, 214 Rhinoceros (2006)  145 Richardson, Autumn  112 Richardson, Tony  203, 205, 209 Riddins Mound Estate, Cradley Heath  26, 107 River (2001)  124 Rivers, Ben  115 Rodchenko, Alexander  55, 82, 213 Romantic Detachment (New York, 2004)  129 Romanticism, neo-Romanticism, alt-Romanticism  128–31 Romer, Patrick  11, 162–3, 205 Rose, Steve  12, 171, 187, 204 Rosenthal, Mark  117 Rosenthal, Norman  75–6, 81, 82, 83, 86 Rowlands, Mark  120 Royal College, London  74, 211, 214 Ruff, Thomas  16 Ruskin, John  130 Saatchi, Charles  1, 5, 36, 55, 73–8, 86, 102, 210 Saatchi-effect  73–5, 210–11 Saatchi Gallery  36, 75, 149, 211 Salinger, Justin  11, 163, 173, 192, 222 Santner, Eric  56 Saville, Jenny  74 Scalo Press, Zurich  45–6, 49, 50 Scruton, Roger  39, 190 Searle, Adrian  48, 50, 55, 81, 87, 88, 96, 134, 218 Seated Figure (1974)  87 Sebeok, Thomas  158–9 Self Portrait (1970) Bacon  86 Self Portrait of a Drowned Man (The Willows) (2011)  115 Sellars, Wilfred  8 semiotic  60, 63, 120, 121, 158–9

Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection (1997)  1, 2, 5, 55, 66, 74–87, 101, 102, 108, 149, 203, 204, 210, 211, 212, 220 Seven (1995)  168 Sexy Beast (2000)  164 Shone, Richard  5, 30, 31, 32, 33, 75 Shot in the Heart  48 Sickert, Walter Richard  3, 29, 30–5, 39–40, 67, 177, 206, 207 Sidaway Street (Old Hill, Cradley Heath)  24, 103, 105, 156, 159, 181, 221 Sillitoe, Alan  203 The Singing Detective (1986)  172 Sladen, Mark  54, 170 Sloth (2005)  145 Smith, Ella  11, 163, 164, 165, 173, 192 Smith, Jack  3, 6, 203 Smith, Matthew Ryan  219 Smith, Murray  65–6, 67 A Snicket, Halifax (1937)  103 Somnambulist (1968)  111 Sontag, Susan  16, 40, 80, 190 South Downs  8, 116, 130 South Downs (2003)  121 Spenser, Diana, Princess of Wales  6, 76 Spenser, Stanley  130 Stallabrass, Julian  6, 55, 66, 76, 77–9, 80, 209, 211, 212 Stour Valley  116, 130 Stremmel, Kerstin  13, 99 Struth, Thomas  15, 103 Study for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sideways) (1971)  86 Suffolk  116, 206 Sultan, Larry  15, 36, 37, 80 Sultan, Terrie  128, 129, 130 Sunderland University  4, 16, 17, 36, 37, 43, 44, 134 Sussex Weald  116 Sutherland, Graham  111 Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)  51 Sylvester, David  3, 9, 21, 39, 203, 212, 217 The Symbolism of Habitat (1990)  119–28 Tapir (2005)  153–6 Tarantino, Michael  2, 53, 54, 88, 95, 97, 101, 104, 197, 200, 213 A Taste of Honey (1961)  205, 209, 222

I ndex   243

Tate Gallery Turner Prize (2001)  25, 102 Taylor-Johnson, Sam  161, 204, 212, 219 Telegraph Magazine  16, 17, 44, 46, 136, 206, 217 Telegraph Poles (2001)  124 Teller, Juergen  5 Terence Davies Trilogy (Children [1976], Madonna and Child [1980], Death and Transfiguration [1983])  4, 97–8, 188 Thatcher, Margaret  15, 24, 70, 74–5, 76, 80, 203, 210, 223 ‘This Be the Verse’  50 This Boy’s Life (1989)  48 This Is England (2007)  186 Thomson, Iain  118 Thoreau, Henry David  19 Three Colours: Blue (1993)  10 Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962)  87 Thurber, Shellburne  5 Tickner, Lisa  32, 33, 34, 39, 207, 208 Tiger (2005)  146 Tillmans, Wolfgang  5 Tinsley, Eliza  24, 206 Todes, Samuel  131, 217 toilet  22, 50, 57, 64–5, 68, 169, 209, 211 Tomlinson, Ricky  169 Tony Smoking Backwards (1998)  102 Townsend, Chris  2 Trainspotting (1996)  4, 50, 64–5 Trainspotting (novel, 1993)  64 trauma  10, 11, 14, 69, 96, 112, 123, 130, 137, 139, 156–60 Triptych (1971)  86 Triptych of Ray (1990)  17–22 Trocchi, Alexander  58, 98–9, 199, 223 Turk, Gavin  74, 203, 210 Turner, J. M. W.  128 Tuton, Jacob  163, 164, 176 Two Years at Sea (2011)  115 Uexküll, Jacob von  158–9 Umwelt  142, 156–9 Uncanny (Unheimlich)  8, 12, 41, 77, 110, 113, 163, 165, 191–3 underclass  1, 12, 24, 65–66, 79–80, 195–196, 209 Under the Skin (2013)  164 Untitled Elephant (2006)  149–50 Untitled Landscape (2008)  117

244   Index

Vermeer, Johannes de  83–5, 212, 213 VIVID Birmingham Arts Centre  8, 133–6, 145, 156 Vuillard, Edouard  29 Waiting for Godot  208, 220 Wall, Jeff  5, 84, 110 Wallinger, Mark  74, 203, 210 Wallis, Henry  174 Walton, Kendall  39, 190 Waplington, Nick  1, 16 Waterhouse, Keith  203 Watkins, Jonathan  24, 25, 56, 101, 102, 105, 156 Way, Tony  163 Wearing, Gillian  204 weird  95, 112, 115, 192 Welsh, Irvine  64 What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)  53 Wheatley, Ben  115 White Chalk (2007)  115 The White Horse  126, 127 Whiteread, Rachel  74, 77, 104 Who’s Looking at the Family? (1994)  4, 15–17, 19, 36, 136, 159, 161 Why Look at Animals?  134–5, 143–8 Williams, Gilda  55, 71, 86 Williams, Paul Andrew  195 Williams, Raymond  50 Williams, Tony  188, 213 Williams, Val  15–17, 36, 80, 136, 205–206 Wilson, Richard  74 Winson Green, Birmingham  12, 205, 219 Wittgenstein (1993)  219 Wolff, Tobias  48 Woodfall Films  51, 209 Woodman, Francesca  19 Yass, Catherine  104 Young British Artists (YBA)  1, 5, 74, 75, 203, 210 Young, Rob  130 Zigrosser, Carl  104 Žižek, Slavoj  9, 193–4 Zoo  9–10, 17, 91, 98, 132–60, 165, 168, 169, 179–80, 187, 213, 217, 218, 220 Zoologische Gärten (1993)  142

245

246

247

248

249

250

PLATE 1  Richard Billingham, Untitled (1990), RAL #17 [EE Plate 19] (1996).

PLATE 2  Walter R. Sickert, L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909). Oil on canvas (61 × 41 cm). Private Collection. Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 3  Richard Billingham, RAL #37 [EE Plate 37] (1996).

PLATE 4  Richard Billingham, RAL #16 [EE Plate 18] (1996).

PLATE 5  Richard Billingham, RAL #33 [EE Plate 33] (1996).

PLATE 6  Richard Billingham, RAL #3 [EE Plate 5] (1996).

PLATE 7  Richard Billingham, RAL #20 [EE Plate 22] (1996).

PLATE 8  Richard Billingham, RAL #42 [EE Plate 42] (1996).

PLATE 9  Richard Billingham, RAL #43 [EE Plate 43] (1996).

PLATE 10  Richard Billingham, RAL #54 [EE Plate 53] (1996).

PLATE 11  Richard Billingham, RAL #55 [EE Plate 53] (1996).

PLATE 12  Richard Billingham, RAL #32 [EE Plate 32] (1996).

PLATE 13  Richard Billingham, RAL #13 [EE Plate 15] (1996).

PLATE 14  Richard Billingham, RAL #22 [EE Plate 23] (1996).

PLATE 15  Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (1996). Colour photograph on aluminium (158 × 105 cm).

PLATE 16  Fishtank (1998) (video still).

PLATE 17 Richard Billingham, Black Country (Day) Untitled #10 (1997). Colour photograph (75 × 92 cm).

PLATE 18  Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #8 (2003). Light-jet colour print on aluminium (111 × 136 cm).

PLATE 19  Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #11 (2003). Light-jet colour print on aluminium (111 × 136 cm).

PLATE 20  Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #7 (2003). Light-jet colour print on aluminium (111 × 136 cm).

PLATE 21  Richard Billingham, Black Country (Night) Untitled #5 (2003). No dimensions.

PLATE 22 Richard Billingham, (Norfolk) Dyke (2003). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

PLATE 23  Richard Billingham, Cloud Break (2001). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

PLATE 24 Richard Billingham, (Norfolk) Gates (2002/3). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5).

PLATE 25  Richard Billingham, Norfolk Landscape (2002). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

PLATE 26  Richard Billingham, Cows in the Rain (2003). Light-jet colour print (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

PLATE 27  J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise (1835–40). Oil on canvas (78 × 122 cm), Tate Britain.

PLATE 28  Richard Billingham, Sloth (2005). C-print on aluminium (144.5 × 178.5 cm).

PLATE 29  Richard Billingham, Mandrills (2005). C-print on aluminium (166.5 × 205.9 cm).

PLATE 30  Richard Billingham, Bear Pit (2006). C-print on aluminium (126.5 × 154.5 cm).

PLATE 31  Richard Billingham, Untitled NRAL (Dog) (1995) (80 × 120 cm).

PLATE 32  Richard Billingham, Zoo (Chimpanzee) (2006). Single-screen video projection (5m 44s), dimensions variable.

PLATE 33  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Liz and jigsaw) (2018).

PLATE 34  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Ray at window) (2018).

PLATE 35  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: sky) (2018).

PLATE 36  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton Richard: Family in house) (2018).

PLATE 37  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: Lol on couch) (2018).

PLATE 38  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: parents in bed) (2018).

PLATE 39  Ray & Liz, Richard Billingham, (photograph by Bob Baker Ashton: camera obscura) (2018).