Richard Billingham (born 25 September 1970)[1] is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher.
[3] Billingham was born in Birmingham and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland.
[3][10] He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath, a body of work later added to and published in the acclaimed book Ray's A Laugh (1996).
[11] However, there is such integrity in this work that Ray and Liz ultimately shine through as troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities.
The critic Julian Stallabrass describes Ray and Liz as embodiments of "what is in legend a particularly British stoicism and resilience, in the face of the tempest of modernity.
[3][4][14] Since 2011, Fishtank has been part of the Artangel Collection – 25 notable films available for loan, free of charge, to publicly funded UK museums and galleries.
[15] He has also made landscape photographs at places of personal significance around the Black Country, and more of these were commissioned in 2003 by the arts organisation The Public, resulting in a book.
In late 2006, Billingham exhibited a major new series of photographs and videos inspired by his memories of visiting Dudley Zoo as a child.