A Family Affair

Photography is so easy, so available, so superfluous. It accrues a wider value with such difficulty, and I feel this whenever I pick up a camera. Taking photographs inspires a certain anxiety in me, akin to those moments in childhood when you realise that the world doesn't revolve around you. Why take this image and not that one? Who says anyone else will want to look at it? I used to take a lot of photos, but now if I take pictures at all it's only of my family and friends - at least the value of these images is secure to me. In other words I take photos as most people do, avoiding the responsibility of making images that will be of interest to anyone else. The immediate or extended family may be one of photography's great subjects, but there's nothing more boring than looking through a stranger's photo album. So why is it that the family pictures of Richard Billingham, a young British photographer, exert such a fascination upon me?

One reason is that Billingham's experience of family life is so clearly different from my own. He has recently published a photo-essay, Ray's a Laugh, and most of the images in the book were taken in the council flat in the Midlands where his family live. His father Ray, his mother Liz and his younger brother Jason are crammed together, competing for space with a profusion of knick-knacks and pets. Billingham tells us that his father is a chronic alcoholic who rarely leaves the house, that his brother has been in and out of care - but his words only scratch the surface, while the photographs teem with emotional chaos and physical squalor. And yet is this family really so different from my own, or that of anyone else? The factor which places Billingham's pictures apart is not the extremity of what they depict but their symbolic resonance.

The power of these images is both individual and cumulative. There's a strong sense of repetition, and one learns to recognise the cycles of love, violence and exhaustion which sweep over the flat, and how to read the emotional territory staked out by such visual tokens as the bottle of beer and the bloody nose. As well as a temporal cycle there's also a conceptual one. These photographs show how the pattern of familial power and dependency replicates itself like a virus, spreading through the visual realm. They say that people grow to look like their pets, that their pets grow to look like them, and there's an image of two of Liz's dogs, one of which sits up on a sofa in an alarmingly anthropomorphic pose. The dog becomes an image of the Mater Dolorosa - one of Liz' aspects, and one that she projects through the sentimental icons that fill the flat. But where the Virgin's breasts should be are two rows of bitch's teats, making me aware of the gap between our desires and the world, and how violently we attempt to link the two through representation.

Ray sits on a bed, hanging his head. In front of him are a bottle of alcohol and some bread - apparently his main forms of sustenance - but also a key. The key is in such sharp focus that my eye is drawn towards it, and I find myself trying to read into it the possibility of escape from this microcosm. These photographs are so difficult to look at that I scan them for signs of redemption, only to become aware of the impossible burden that I am placing on the image. There is a current of nonsense which runs through these pictures which resists any simple allegorical reading. In one picture a cat flies over Ray's head. I guess it's been thrown, but I don't know why or by whom. These things just happen to Ray, and I begin to share his drunken abdication of any attempt to make sense of the scenario. There really is no room to swing a cat in here, and the image shares the comic sadism of that phrase, with its combination of the practical and the pointless.

I don't know what the implications are of publishing these photos. This is not a photographic project in the normal sense; these pictures are given shape by Billingham's contract with his family, and it is hard not to see their publication as a breaking of that contract. But in the end, these images cannot simply be mapped onto individual lives. They have transformed their material, and their resonance suggests that they have transformed it into a public statement. These photos are already a reinvention - of an identity and of a practice. As Jason says, Ray's a laugh, but he doesn't want to be like him.