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(Kibin, 2025)
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Kibin. (2025). An essay on richard billingham's photography. http://www.kibin.com/essay-examples/an-essay-on-richard-billinghams-photography-lo2IjTLq
Critical Analysis
of Richard Billingham's Photography
Critical Analysis of
Richard Billingham's Photography
Richard Billingham
has established himself as one of the quintessential British artists
of the 1990’s. While in many respects, his aesthetic style remains
distinctive from that of other young British artists, his work
concerns issues often explored by his contemporaries. In this essay,
I will discuss a selection of what I believe to be his most
interesting and definative photographs, in addition to a comparison
of Billingham’s work, ideology, and myth with those of principal
yBa’s.
The son of an
unemployed mechanic and an obese housewife, Richard Billingham was
born in 1970 near Birmingham, England. He received his Bachelor of
Arts in Fine Arts in 1994 from the University of Sunderland, where as
an undergraduate, he took the photographs that have become his
best-known works.
These large,
colorful, energetic and uniformly untitled prints were taken over a
period of seven years and compiled into a photoessay entitled Ray’s
a Laugh. These same images were included in numerous gallery and
museum exhibitions, including MoMA’s “New Photography”
exhibition in 1996, and the infamous “Sensation” exhibit at the
Royal Academy in 1997 and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999.
Originally intended
to serve as studies for paintings, photographed with an ordinary
auto-focus camera, and developed at the local drug store, Billingham
did not consider himself much of a “photographer” and was largely
unconcerned with the technical formality of photography: “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.”
Accordingly, this lax method has not gone unnoticed by Billingham’s critics: “Almost every rule of photography is badly broken: pictures are out of focus, over-exposed, printed with a grain so visible that the image beneath is almost completely
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