Interpretation

When looking through Billingham's 'Black Country' 2003 series i found one image which inspired me greatly. The image below is one of Billingham's image that he took when commissioned by The Public.

This image from Billingham’s  second series of ‘Black Country’ is my favourite, I like this image because of its composition and colour. The contrast between the clear vivid blue sky and the orangey glow of the street lamp is eye catching. I am also really fond of the symmetry within the image, the sign on the wall and the white object in the back of the car.

The shadow gives the picture a lot of depth, i feel as it echoes the building next to it. I have experimented with the composition, colour and symmetry seen in this image myself and used a disposable camera to achieve the grainy effect of this image.

My Interpretation...

I took this image as I was inspired by Billingham’s work, I loved the colours he used and the effects he produced from using shadows in his work.

This image has been edited to enhance and emulate that orangey glow that is seen in his Black Country series as there were no street lamps near this location.

I am really pleased with my first attempt to show my interpretation of Billinghams work.

I used a disposable camera to take this image, I feel it replicates the quality of billinghams grainy images best.

 

To produce my interpretation i had to make some changes, in my original image the sky that you could see was blurred and there were buildings in the way, therefore i decided to take one of my other images with a lot of sky and edit it into the background of my original image. here you can see the steps i took:

 

                 Original image:

cut out of the background sky:

sky that i edited in:

final edited image:

 

Book Reseach...

When looking for Richard Billingham in books i came across this page in the book called 'The photograph as a contemporary art' By Charlotte cotton, this piece on Billingham was very helpful for my research and told me a lot about Billingham when he was just starting out and the reasoning behind the images he took for the book 'Ray's a laugh'.

In this piece on Billingham i found out a lot about what these images were originally taken for and how he came about using them for a book. The piece states: 'A visiting examiner who also happened to be the picture editor of a newspaper magazine saw the photographs in Billingham's studio and encouraged him to consider these rather than his paintings.'

The reasoning behind this is that the original reason Billingham took these images is because he would paint from them as his father (Ray) wouldn't keep still long enough for him to paint his desired image, so he took a photograph of his father in the pose and setting he wanted and was then going to use this as resource material for his paintings.

Billingham used the advice of the visiting examiner and started to take more photographs for this series, he eventually made a book called ' Ray's a laugh' which was published in 1996.

Research into Richard Billingham

When researching into Billingham i found a very interesting quote of his...

"I was living in this tower block; there was just me and him. He was an alcoholic, he would lie in the bed, drink, get to sleep, wake up, get to sleep, didn't know if it was day or night. But it was difficult to get him to stay still for more than say 20 minutes at a time so I thought that if I could take photographs of him that would act as source material for these paintings and then I could make more detailed paintings later on. So that's how I first started taking photographs." (Richard Billingham)

I really like the idea that his work is not nessacerily intentional, he was initially just capturing images to turn into paintings but now that he has had so much positive feedback on his images he went forward to galleries etc with these images and now has a new found fame out of taking images where the door to family life has been kicked wide open and what used to be very private is now becoming very public.

I also find the fact that he uses the cheapest film he could find and just lets the negatives get marked and scratched because he feels it adds towards the feel and story behind his images.

Briefing

To start this assignment we were asked to choose a folded up piece of paper out of a box without looking, on this piece of paper would be a photographer. When we had chosen our photographer we were told that we needed to research this photographer and make a presentation answering the following questions:

What is their approach/what tradition does their work belong to?

What is their work about?

How is their work made? What equipment/techniques do they use?

Where have they published their work (books, galleries, magazines etc)?

To start off my research i decided to look in a book i owned 'The Photography Book' Phaidon, in here i found a page on Richard Billingham,

As the text is not clear on the scanned in image i will pick out my favourite parts of the text that explains Billingham's work,

'Billingham's study is a corrective to the melodramatic but well-turned-out soap operas on British television. His tactic is to get close enough to ornaments, wallpaper and skin texture to bring the milieu to believeable life.'

'The idea may be that puzzle-solving stands for mending lives broken into pieces'

'This is Elizabeth, the photographers mother, who appears in Billingham's celebrated family album of 1996 called 'Ray's a laugh' a title from the bygone radio comedy programme'