Presentation
Culture Trumps Content: The Irony of Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh
I Don’t Care to Discuss It: Art, Media, and the State in a Globalized Economy, Department of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario, London
(2009)
Abstract
Britain’s art community never heard tell of Richard Billingham until he exhibited a staunchly candid series of photographs in his first group exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery in 1994. Reminiscent of a long-established, photographic autobiographical genre, as seen through the revolutionary lenses of Nick Waplington and Nan Goldin, Billingham captured the emotional plights and debilitating vices of his family’s working-class pedigree over a six year period from 1990-1996. His Ray’s a Laugh series is the quintessential visual document in determining the pervasive failure of Conservative domestic policies with respect to the disassembly of the welfare state and the de-industrialization of Britain.
Keywords
- Richard Billingham,
- photography,
- United Kingdom,
- England,
- family,
- documentary,
- poverty,
- nostalgia,
- neoliberalism,
- Thatcher,
- Major,
- yBa
Disciplines
Publication Date
2009
Citation Information
Matthew Ryan Smith. "Culture Trumps Content: The Irony of Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh" I Don’t Care to Discuss It: Art, Media, and the State in a Globalized Economy, Department of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario, London (2009) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/matthewryansmith/6/