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. Rays a Laugh (1996). Found at
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html on 08/12/2012
Figure 2: Richard Billingham. Rays a Laugh (1996). Found at
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html on 08/12/2012
Figure 3: Richard Billingham. Rays a Laugh (1996). Found at
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/richard-billingham-rays-laugh.html on 08/12/2012
Figure 4: Richard Billingham. Rays a Laugh (1996). Found at
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
Figure 6: Martin Parr. Signs of Times (1991). Found at
http://www.imagesource.com/blog/martin-parr-signs-of-the-times-exhibition-and-book/ on
09/12/2014
Figure 7: Martin Parr. Signs of Times (1991). Found at
https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL53GUDGH on 09/12/2014
Figure 8: Martin Parr. Signs of Times (1991). Found at
https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL53GUDGH on 09/12/2014
Figure 9: Martin Parr. Signs of Times (1991). Found at
https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL53GUDGH on 09/12/2014

London, 2014

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 familys
homes. The projects that were chosen for the analysis are Martin Parrs Signs of
Times (1991), which has a interesting satirical view of the british home, and
Richard Billinghams Rays 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 Rays 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. Billinghams Rays a

Laugh (Figures 1, 2, 3 & 4) big group exhibition happened in 1994, at the Barbican
Art Gallery, in London.

Figure 1

Figure 3

Figure 2

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 doesnt 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 hes 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. Thats the thing about my dad, theres no
subject hes interested in, except drink. (Billingham, 1996)

Even that it was not the photographers intention, Rays 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. Its almost as the
scene is happening in front of the viewer, so natural it is in the picture. Portraying
any familys 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:
Its 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).
Rays 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 vrit encounter (utata.org).
Thats is the mood Richard Billinghams project has. A much darker way to
see home, and in this case were shown a shocking one. In Rays 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 Parrs 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 worlds 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 works
subjects.
The following quotation is the description of the work we are about to
analyze, according to Magnum's official website:

"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 Parrs signature sense humor and approach, exposing peoples
perfect imperfections in a subtle way.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

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 houses inhabitants personality, social class and how they
deal with life itself.
We can also sense in Parrs 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 Billinghams 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. Billinghams 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.
Billinghams life background is exactly that one represented in Rays 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 persons

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 photographers. 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 Parrs 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 Billinghams 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 essays one, home. Narrowing it down, both of them express
different views of the British families ways and lifestyle. While Billinghams
approach has a darker view of an extremely impoverished family with all kinds of
troubles and problems surrounding them, Parrs 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.

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)