Richard Billingham — Ray's a Laugh

Richard Billingham's photographs of his own family, first published as a book in 1996 and reissued by MACK in 2024 in a form closer to what he first intended.

The pictures were taken inside the family's high-rise council flat in the West Midlands and show his father Ray, his mother Liz, his younger brother Jason and the household pets, in a home marked by Ray's drinking and by poverty. Billingham meant them as studies for paintings; a tutor on his Sunderland University course found them and persuaded him to show them as photographs in their own right. After the book appeared, his work was included in Sensation, the exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection held at London's Royal Academy of Arts in 1997, and in 2001 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

The 1996 book was published in Zürich by Scalo, and Michael Collins and Julian Germain were its editors. The new version brings in many previously unseen pictures and a fresh sequence that reflects his background in painting; MACK calls it a director's cut. A companion volume, Ray's a Laugh: A Reader, came out alongside it: Liz Jobey edited it, pairing her new essay on the work's history with interviews and essays published since 1996.

MACK, 2024. 320 pages, linen hardcover, 23.4 x 31 cm.