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.