Pictures From Home Fill a Gallery With Pain

In 1990, English artist Richard Billingham began taking photographs of his family. He was 20 at the time, and planned to use the pictures as studies for paintings, so when he left home the following year to study art at the University of Suderland, the photographs went with him.

“When I was away at school I’d go home every few months and take more pictures of them. Then a visiting lecturer at school saw some of the photographs lying about my studio,” recalls Billingham, who passed through L.A. to install the show of his photographs on view through April 5 at Regen Projects. “He then came ‘round to see some more, and a few years later he showed them to someone from Scalo Publishers who approached me about doing a book.”

That Scalo published a book of Billingham’s pictures in 1996 isn’t surprising--it’s a startling body of work. Billingham’s family was one of many hit hard by Margaret Thatcher’s economy, and the squalid house he grew up in often had no heat or electricity. The “star” of Billingham’s photographs is his father, Raymond, a 66-year-old alcoholic who spends his time making and drinking home-brewed ale, fighting with his wife and recovering for his next bout with booze. Billingham photographs Ray--as well as his younger brother, his obese and heavily tattooed mother, the family cats and dogs, and his mother’s half-hearted attempts at interior decorating--with a candor that’s at once detached and movingly tender. Billingham clearly loves his family.

Published last year with no explanatory text and little promotion other than an endorsement on the book jacket from legendary photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank, “Ray’s a Laugh” has transformed Billingham’s life. He now has representation in London (Anthony Reynolds Gallery), his work is currently on view at New York’s Luhring Augustine Gallery and was featured on the cover of the January Artforum, and he was one of 12 artists included in the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “New Photography” exhibition, an annual survey of breaking trends in the genre.

“At first I wondered why anyone would be impressed by a photograph of a dog licking the floor,” says the 26-year-old artist, who was trained as a painter and has never taken a photography class. “I never considered photography art, probably because nobody pays much attention to it in England. There’s no serious gallery devoted to photography in London, and when Robert Frank wrote the comment that appears on the jacket of my book, I didn’t even know who he was.

“People in America are much more interested in these pictures than anyone in England is--and I have to admit, I still prefer painting to photography,” adds Billingham, who mentions Willem de Kooning, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach as artists he particularly admires.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Billingham had little exposure to art as a child but was one of those kids who was always drawing--”I mostly drew motorbikes and animals,” recalls the artist.

“My father was a manual laborer who got made redundant when Thatcher came to power, and he hasn’t worked since 1980. He’d been alcoholic ever since I could remember, but at that point he started drinking more because he had nothing to fill his time with. My mother doesn’t drink but she smokes a lot, and they spend most of their money on cigarettes, which are quite expensive in Britain. They live very simply. My mother loves kitsch and cuddly things and they watch television a lot. They’re intelligent people, but they think they couldn’t live differently if they wanted to because they feel trapped.

“My parents have heat now, but they often didn’t when I was growing up,” Billingham continues. “There were no lights and the water was cut off for a time, so my brother was taken away from my parents and sent to live with foster parents because he wasn’t attending school. That upset them for a while, but they soon got over it.

“Some of the photographs express anger I felt toward them,” he concedes. “There’s one of my father slumped next to a toilet that I took intending to show it to him in the hope it might make him stop drinking. But he just looked at it and laughed, and said, ‘Look at me down by the toilet.’ Seeing the pictures did make my parents stop fighting though--the photographs of them hitting each other really disturbed them. They love each other and are happy to be together, but my father’s in a lot of emotional pain because of his drinking, although he never admits it. His parents were staunchly religious teetotalers, and I guess drinking was his way to rebel. He has an older brother who also drinks heavily--I’ve taken quite a few photographs of him as well.”

Billingham lives six miles from the house he grew up in, in a small flat where he spends much of his time painting. “I’ve got quite a simple life and wouldn’t want a big complicated career. I go to the shop and get something for my tea, I don’t watch TV and I listen to music. David Bowie’s my favorite.

“My family doesn’t care if I take pictures of them, and they’ve seen the book and thought it was really good--they don’t think the pictures are cruel, nor do I,” he says of the photographs, which are also published in editions of from five to 10 prints. “My intention was that the work be as moving as possible.

“I don’t know if I’ll continue photographing my family--I feel I understand them now, so there’s really no reason to. I found things out about my relationship with them through the photographs, because when you look at a photograph you see it as an outsider. I now see them inside and outside and have a bigger picture of how they live and why they live that way.

“When I was growing up I was ashamed of my family, mostly because we had no money,” Billingham says. “But I stopped feeling ashamed of them when I started taking photographs--for some reason, having people see pictures of my family helped me come to terms with them. And, I’ve also come to understand that whether there’s money or not, most families are troubled because we’re all human.”

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through April 5. (310) 276-5424.