Ray's a Laugh: A Reader

Published by MACK, 2024Softcover, 160 pages19.5 x 12.5cm | 7.6 x 4.9 inEdited by Liz JobeyContributions from Charlotte Cotton, Gordon Burn, Lynn Barber, and Jim LewisISBN: 9781915743367From the publisher:In 1996, a book of photographs by an unknown young British photographer was launched on to the London contemporary art market to immediate popular and critical success. The pictures were taken within the claustrophobic, chaotic interior of a Birmingham council flat where the photographer’s father, Ray, an alcoholic, lived with Liz, his sedentary and occasionally violent mother, and his younger brother Jason.For the public, including cultured, art-loving viewers, the pictures were a shock: more intimate, more personal, more oppressive than the well-meaning photojournalistic study of working-class poverty to which they were accustomed. Some saw them as a betrayal – exposing unsuspecting family members to potential humiliation – but from Richard Billingham’s point of view they made moral