British photographer, Richard Billingham, is best known for the raw, colour photographs of his dysfunctional family, shot across seven years of their routine drinking, fighting, smoking, passing out and pet throwing in their cramped West Midlands Council flat. With deceptive snapshot spontaneity, these images proved an insightful, disquietingly intimate and at times brutal portrait of working class life. If this photographic series, and the subsequent publication entitled Ray's a Laugh (after his chronic alcoholic father), and the docu-film, Fishtank (1998), may be seen as Billingham's cathartic outpouring from his claustrophobic past, it is perhaps not surprising that his future work should turn his lens outwards, to explore the wider horizons of the outside world.

Billingham's photographs between 1992-1997 were the antithesis of his emotional intensity, by shooting the nondescript and overlooked environs of his home district of Cradley Heath -- what he has described as "the most boring subject I could choose after the direct photographs of my family." While these urban landscapes still tapped into a close psychological relationship with his past, the subject was fading as the focal point in Billingham's project, as he explained, "I want to take a photograph that's not a picture of something, it's just a picture of the space." Like German photographer, Thomas Ruff's, generic, "undistinguished" architecture shot around the suburbs of Düsseldorf in the 1980s, Billingham also saw the potential for photography to not only capture, but also to somehow structure and compose reality. Yet, far from taking the medium towards Ruff's hard-edged conceptualism, Billingham explored photography's power to transform the mundane, or the momentary, into images of romantic, ethereal timelessness.

The last few years have allowed Billingham to explore a much broader field with residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the British School in Rome, as well as extended trips to off the beaten path locations such as Pakistan, Greece and Ethiopia. The resulting landscapes are less about documenting the specific character of place, than exploring the compositional and pictorial possibilities of photography itself. As he explains, "I just want to move the viewer, not necessarily by the subject, but by the composition, the unity and harmony in it."

Using a medium format camera, and long exposure--allowing sharpened focus across the middle-distance, Billingham translates one-off moments into vignettes of light, atmosphere and natural texture. Ethiopia is shown as a world of contrast: from the dusty roads and dappled desert sky, to the sumptuous green jungles and peopled only by quietly grazing grazing cows. Elsewhere Billingham captures fleeting changes in the weather: ominous clouds hanging over bogland or dissipated as veiled mists over a beach in Karachi. These are isolated spaces, yet there is usually some reference to an underlying human presence: a path twisting into the background, or footprints in the sand. When people are represented they are shot at distance as an accentuation of the surrounding landscape, as in the beguilingly beautiful image, Tourists (2001). Here, a wooden boat carrying the travellers seems bizarrely suspended in space above the crystal clear water of an underground pool.

By clearly drawing on both his own training as a painter, and a profound appreciation of the emotive naturalism of painters such as Ruysdael, Claude, Poussin, Turner and Constable, Billingham takes the tradition of early 20th Century photographic Pictorialism firmly into the next generation. Edward Steichen once famously said that, "The painter creates, evolves, produces texture. The photographer represents texture." Richard Billingham constantly tests the limits of these parameters, creating a tension between the picture looked at as if it were a painting, and the complex temporality of the photograph itself.

Kate Zamet
March 2003