Untitled,
1995
Untitled,
1995
Untitled,
1995
Untitled,
1994
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richard billingham
at luhring augustine
by Carlo McCormick
No one likes to look at the truth, not
simply because it can be ugly or remind us
of things we'd rather ignore, but because
the truth ultimately can do no less than
reveal everything else as lies. And as
subjective as any truth may be, every now
and then someone like Richard Billingham
comes along who gets it just right, with
such undeniable honesty and clarity that
there can be no denying its greater
authority. Billingham tells the truth about
things most people assume they have a
pretty good idea about already. He does it
with a familiarity and directness that
renders all our received ideas on these
matters as utter fictions.
In the richly enhanced colors, seemingly
casual focus and domestic intimacy of his
painterly photographs, Billingham tells the
almost tender details of family
dysfunction, speaking volumes on the lost
and neglected reality of alcoholism,
poverty, pain, violence and even love.
Richard knows so well of what he speaks
because he's lived it. That man drinking
himself into a daily stupor, that obese
lady he fights with and makes up with or
simply ignores, that kid whose confusion
and retreat echoes the claustrophobic
disarray all around them, and even that
eccentric character who romps about in
clownish costume (in a series of photos yet
to be publicly exhibited); they are, of
course, his family.
What's probably so troubling to many about
this dead-end Council Housing world of
disenfranchised British working-class
boredom and banality isn't its squalor as
much as the way that squalor isn't even an
issue here. These photographs are not
socially motivated, and if they can't help
but push all those buttons in our
collective conscience, their residing power
and transcendent beauty is that they are so
much more personal than that. This is not
the problematic voyeurism and inherent
condescension that comes with the role of
photojournalist-as-social-anthropologist.
You see, for Richard this is all quite
normal and everyday.
Richard Billingham, Feb. 15-Mar. 22, 1997,
at Luhring Augustine, 130 Prince Street,
New York, NY 10012.
CARLO McCORMICK is associate editor of
Paper.
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