Richard Billingham graduated from the University of Sunderland in 1994, the same year that he took part in his first group exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. For seven years Billingham had taken photographs of his parents, brother and pets in their Sunderland council estate flat, initially as studies for paintings. Then, with the help of a photography editor friend, he began showing these 'studies', which have now been exhibited to great acclaim at galleries in New York, Milan and Paris, as well as Anthony Reynolds in London. They have also been made into a book entitled Ray's a Laugh.

Billingham's photographs have been hailed as a mass of contradictions. They are as naïve, humane and beautiful as they are artificial, raw and disconcerting. They lie somewhere between documentary and fiction. As an obvious insider, Billingham is as much spectator as actor in this tragicomedy of domestic life.

Against the grain of traditional British propriety, the photographs are a warts-and-all depiction of a disconsolate working class family. Billingham's parents, Ray and Liz, are the primary focus of the pictures. Seen through the camera's lens, they are at once heroic and lamentable. In one image we see Liz handing Ray a plate of food; his arms are extended and a thankful smile lights up his face. In another, Ray, a chronic alcoholic, is witnessed passed out on the bathroom floor, his vomit covering the toilet seat. Still another shot shoes Liz nursing a puppy with a syringe, supported by her large tattooed arm. Whether violent, miserable, or endearing, Billingham's photographs evince the artist's understanding of his subject's spiritedness in their ineluctable situation.