Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham is a British artist, filmmaker and photographer. He originally studied painting at Sunderland University but later became interested in photography and filmmaking. His work deals with themes of home, place and marginalisation.   

His first photographs were about his immediate family in the West Midlands, living in a high-rise block of flats. They were collected into a publication called ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ in 1996 and exhibited internationally. The images show the poverty and deprivation of his family yet his mother, father and brother ultimately shine through as troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities. Other bodies of work include ‘Black Country’, a series of urban photographs made around his home town of Cradley Heath and ‘Zoo’ a series of photographs and video installations about confinement and its effects on animals in zoos around the world. He has also photographed extensively in the British landscape. 

His photography and video installations have had over forty solo exhibitions and been included in over two hundred group exhibitions internationally. Billingham’s work is in public collections such as the V&A and Tate Galleries, London, San Francisco MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1997, he was the first recipient of the CitiBank Photography Prize (now the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize) and was included in the seminal exhibition, Sensation, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Billingham was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001. More recently he was awarded the Douglas Hickox Award for Best Debut Director at the London Independent Film Awards 2018; the IWC Schaffhausen Award 2018 and a number of other prizes for his feature film ‘Ray & Liz’, based on his lived experience as a child growing up on a council estate during the Thatcher era. 

Richard Billinghm currently has a second feature film in development with the BFI based on the novel ‘At Hawthorn Time’ by Mellissa Harrison.