photography and the home - essay

8/16/2019 Photography and the Home - Essay

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Gabriel Rodrigues dos Santos | University of Roehampton | PHT020N201A

Photography and the Home

1. With reference to at least two bodies of photographic work, evaluate and analyse

the ways in which the idea of ‘home’ is constructed. In answering this question you

may want to specifically consider the relationship between your case study and

other, orthodox or oppositional representations of home.

List of figures:

Figure 1: Richard Billingham. “Ray’s a Laugh” (1996). Found at

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html on 08/12/2012






http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/richard_billingham.htm on 08/12/2012

Figure 5: Martin Parr. “Signs of Times” (1991). Found at

https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL53GUDGH on 09/12/2014


http://www.imagesource.com/blog/martin-parr-signs-of-the-times-exhibition-and-book/ on

09/12/2014







London, 2014


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Home is a wide concept that can be shown and developed with a large

number of points of views. The intent of this essay is to explore the concept of home

by comparing two photographic projects, both of them focusing on British family’s

homes. The projects that were chosen for the analysis are Martin Parr’s “Signs of

Times” (1991), which has a interesting satirical view of the british home, and

Richard Billingham’s “Ray’s a Laugh” (1996), a project with a darker atmosphere

that documents the daily life of a dysfunctional family.

First of all, it is suitable for the next steps of the essay to clarify some

concepts that will be covered in the comparison. Starting with the definition of

home, which, according to The Oxford English Dictionary is “The place where one

lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household”, a “social unit

occupying a permanent residence” or “the district or country where one was born

or has settled on a long-term basis”. From this definition we can already notice that

the word Home has more than one meaning, being possible to be associated with

the house itself (or the physical space where the individual or family lives), and to

the nation (or any geographic location) where the person was born or reside.

But if we adopt a symbolical point of view to help clarify the concept of

home, there are even more meanings that come up. The home is the place we grow

up and is where most of our experiences happen. As a result we end up

subconsciously associating the home and all its rooms and objects to those

experiences. We associate the kitchen with food and a place of reunion. Our

bedroom is a place of intimacy. The window is our view of the outside world, and so

on.

“Houses offer shelter and protection from the elements; as

places of nurture in which we are born, they become extensions

of the mother archetype and the symbolism involving the womb

as the primary place of shelter inside our mother. A house comes

to represent a home, and a place of security that takes us into an

enclosed space, and into which we can retreat from the external

world, a place we can make our own” (Rahima Spottiswood,

2008).

But above all, as Spottiswood mentioned in the quote above, a home is a symbol of security and comfort. Inside our homes we feel protected from all the

danger from the outside world. But is it always like this? Lets have a look at our first

example of photographic work.

Richard Billingham was born in the year 1970, in Cradley Heath, West

Midlands. According to Utata.org, Billingham actually wanted to be a painter but got

rejected by all the 16 art schools he had applied for. Interestingly, the photographs

of “Ray’s a Laugh”, the project that will be analyzed and the same project who made

Billingham a celebrated photographer, was supposed to become some painting

references instead of being an actual photography project. Billingham’s “Ray’s a


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Laugh” (Figures 1, 2, 3 & 4) big group exhibition happened in 1994, at the Barbican

Art Gallery, in London.

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3 Figure 4

This Project is a documentation on Billingham’ dysfunctional family. It brings

real situations of his difficult relationship with his alcoholic and unemployed father

Ray (Figures 1 & 2) , his obese and impulsive smoker mother Liz (Figures 3 & 4) and

his younger brother Jason. In the photographers own words about his family, we

have that:

“My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic. He doesn’t like

going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks, but she does

smoke a lot. She likes pets and things that are decorative.

They married in 1970 and I was born soon after. My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11, but

now he is back with Ray and Liz again. Recently he became a

father.

Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he’s always been an

alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years. He gets drunk on

cheap cider at the off license. He drinks a lot at nights now and

gets up late. Originally, our family lived in a terraced house, but

they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation, sold the

house. Then we moved to the council tower block, where Ray just

sits in and drinks. That’s the thing about my dad, there’s no subject he’s interested in, except drink.” (Billingham, 1996)


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Even that it was not the photographer’s intention, “Ray’s a Laugh” shocks

people, and what shocks the most about the photographs of this project is the

apparently normal and cotidian way people are in those images. It’s almost as the

scene is happening in front of the viewer, so natural it is in the picture. Portraying

any family’s daily life is a challenge for any other person who is not inserted in that

same reality, differently from Richard, that was actually part of it. There was not an

uncomfortable feeling between two strangers, that is why it seems so natural. The

two quotes below can help to confirm what was stated before:

“It’s not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be

political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually

meaningful as I can make it – in all these photographs I never

bothered with things like the negatives. Some of them got marked

and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be

processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order

out of chaos.” (Billingham, 1996)

“Billingham's snapshots form a kind of family album no

ordinary family member would ever make, let alone show. This is

not a family life of fake smiles and awkward calendar events.

They're more like a backstage glimpse of the chaotic rehearsals.

It's a view that turned Billingham from a would-be painter into a

celebrated photographer” (BBC).

“Ray’s a Laugh” exhibition was very successful in critics and in finances, and

the pictures were sold in a form of a book the year after the exhibition. Some critics

say that the pictures were blurry and framed with cheap and irregularly strange

materials, and terrible quality film stock. It was considered a project that “smashed

their way through to another kind of vérité encounter ” (utata.org).

That’s is the mood Richard Billingham’s project has. A much darker way to

see “home”, and in this case we’re shown a shocking one. In “Ray’s a Laugh”, “The

very private was becoming very public” (BBC).

The exposure of the private life of Billingham differs from the one we got in the other project that will be analyzed, Martin Parr’s “Signs of the Times” (Figures 5,

6, 7 & 8). The houses that were photographed were chosen by the photographer

with permission from the owners or inhabitants of the place.

Parr was born in 1952 and he is one of the world’s most famous documentary

photographer. He has been a full member of the Magnum Agency since 1994. His

background is totally different from Billingham, and consequently his work’s

subjects.

The following quotation is the description of the work we are about to

analyze, according to Magnum's official website:


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"Signs of the Times" is a photographic project about

personal taste in the British home. In 1990, an advert was placed

in the local press up and down Britain seeking volunteers for a

survey of all aspects of their personal taste. From the 2000

respondents, 50 households were chosen featuring a range of age,

gender, racial background, social class, region and type of

personality.

The resulting documentary survey reveals the dreams of

ordinary British people: of country houses and Tuscan villas,

Scandinavian cabins and high-tech Chicago offices filtered

through the discount furniture warehouses and off-the-peg

designer shops.

This project is a serious exploration of British taste. With

poignant, comic and controversial results, it uniquely reveals the

'good taste' of the British heartland.” (MAGNUM website)

The project was released in 1991 as a TV documentary with a follow-up book,

and it brings Parr’s signature sense humor and approach, exposing people’s

“perfect imperfections” in a subtle way.

Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8


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The images are all followed up by a piece of text with quotes extracted from

the documentary, in order to construct a better profile of the person photographed.

Putting all together, it can be said that Parr was very successful in creating a

panorama of the British home, with their lifestyles and tastes.

About what embrace the two projects we should firstly say the different

approaches of an “Englishness”, the British familiar structure, tastes, daily life,

among others. A familiar picture from a house and the ones who live in there has

powerful signs, as each choice of colour, decoration and the state they are found are

actually reflections of the house’s inhabitants personality, social class and how they

deal with life itself.

We can also sense in Parr’s work a sense of unity as a nation through

tradition, as even though the work includes pictures from the most diverse types of

people, a lot of elements repeat throughout the pictures, as some furniture and

curtain styles. Some of the pictures have comments about being important to keep

the “Old England” (Figure 9) and its tradition, making this sense of nation wide open

to the viewer. Distinctively, in Billingham’s project, we notice a different approach,

since what is being documented is a side of England that is not seen as often on the

media and a side that brings surprise even to British people themselves.

Figure 9 - “It is important I suppose to preserve a little bit of old England."

The point of view of each photographer is one of the most contrasting points

of these two projects. Billingham’s view is not only uncommon in mass or popular

media, it is also realistic and natural in a very negative way. This, as explained

before, happens because of his inclusion in that reality, that is a negative one.

Billingham’s life background is exactly that one represented in “Ray’s a Laugh”,

while in “Signs of the Times” we see a much different point of view, that is of

someone who is looking after something he wants to represent. A third person’s


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point of view, as he is not intimately linked to all houses and families he has

pictured in his work.

The choice of moment is very different between the two photographer’s. Parr

look for specific objects and poses, while lightning them properly with a ringflash of

off-camera flash. On the other hand, Billingham style goes for a more “instant” kind

of capture, or in other words, he has a “snapshot” style of photography. These

aspects were crucial to the success of those projects. In the case of Parr’s work, the

bigger amount of preparation before each shot help to support the concept of the

project, adding that classic and perfect look of the interiors of the houses. The same

thing happen in Billingham’s project, where the snapshot look give the images a

more realistic or day-to-day look of a family.

Even though the two projects have so many differences, they still have a

common subject, the essay’s one, home. Narrowing it down, both of them express

different views of the British families ways and lifestyle. While Billingham’s

approach has a darker view of an extremely impoverished family with all kinds of

troubles and problems surrounding them, Parr’s approach brings a humorous look

at British tradition and tastes of high standard families. Both being very successful

to show the British home in some of their possible realities. These projects also

allow us to recognize how photography can be versatile in presenting the same

subject in the most distinguished ways. This is made possible not just because the

photographer have the choice of angle, focus, etc. What makes each photograph

unique is the choice of moment, the interaction with the subject, and the intention

of the photographer and what he wants to communicate. Moreover, it shows how

this medium can be democratic, allowing people from Martin Parr, a middle-class

person with a degree in photography to Billingham, an aspiring painter from a

working class background, to express himself through photographs.


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Bibliography

Billingham, R. (1996). Ray's a laugh. Zurich: Scalo.

Spottiswood, R. (2008). The Symbolism of House Identity. Avaliable at:

http://www.archventures.org.uk/Poems & Articles.htm (acessed: December 02,

2014)

Oxford Dictionaries. Avaliable at:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/home (acessed:

December 02, 2014)

Magnum Photos Website. Signs of the Times - Martin Parr . Avaliable at:

https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL53GU

DGH (acessed: December 03, 2014)

Fallis, G. Richard Billingham. Avaliable at:

http://www.utata.org/sundaysalon/richard-billingham/ (acessed: December 05,

2014)

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