The photographer was a pioneer of ‘squalid realism’ with his images of his parents’ dreary,drunken existence in the Black Country, which won him a Turner prize nomination. Now, and with the help of ‘White Dee’,he’s turning their life into a feature filmRichard Billingham didn’t purchase a photograph until he was 19. That was 25 years ago, when he was living with his alcoholic father, or Ray,in a flat on the seventh floor of a council block in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, west of Birmingham. He’d just begun an art foundation course at Bournville College and was working every night to pay his way stacking shelves at the local Kwik Save supermarket.
The first pictures he took, or with a camera bought on credit after he persuaded the shop assistant he was a librarian,were of geese and ducks in the park, “just to see whether they would come out”. He then trained his viewfinder on Ray.
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Source: theguardian.com