Untitled by Richard Billingham from 'Ray's a Laugh' 1995.

Taken from ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ is this celebrated 90’s image by Richard Billingham. Few in the art world will have missed this photograph and by art world I don’t necessarily mean gallerists and curators, but students, art enthusiasts, gallery goers.

Richard Billingham was studying Fine Art and was primarily a painter, when he took these images of his family in a tower block in the Midlands. He saw them as secondary material for his paintings but his tutors had other ideas. He took pictures of his alcoholic father, Ray and larger than life mother, Elizabeth along with a few of Jason, his younger brother.

Eventually these photographs would culminate into the iconic book ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ whose editorial process was helped along by none other than Adam Curtis, the king of mash up documentaries (Bitter Lake, Hypernormalisation) whose explorations of who yields power in society are critically acclaimed.

I remember taking ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ out from Stockport College library while I was studying Photography as an undergraduate. I kept it for months eventually caving in and giving it back reluctantly to the library assistant. How could I deprive future students from its magic? The reddish tones of Ray in the front cover of the paperback copy and worn pages. But mainly this image.

Ray was asleep and Jason flung the cat at him – a prank that I suggest Richard would have been fully supportive of, particularly because it yielded this picture.

Pictures that make you say ‘Yes’ with every fibre of your being are rare. This is one of them. It makes me feel exactly how I feel when I read a sentence that resonates with me profoundly by one of my favourite writers – James Baldwin, George Orwell, Geoff Dyer…

It’s funny too. The unsuspecting cat directly above Ray momentarily flying while Ray in a movement paralleling the cat’s looks like he’s doing the routine to ‘Walk like an Egyptian’. There is so much richness in this transient scene that Billingham has captured for posterity. It gets to me how Ray is perched on a camping chair adorned with 70’s style flowers. It speaks of a makeshift time when families like mine didn’t worry about whether they could afford to have kids, they just had them (I’m one of four born in the 80’s). Masks and Chinese dragons pepper the dark, rich green wallpaper, decorations lovingly arranged by Elizabeth, who enjoyed complex jigsaws and is seen in the overall book as a strong character, not just in size, but in presence.

The light polygon shining on the door also creates an interesting framing device for the eye. Ray, the cat and the light polygon exist in a wonderful triangular circularity which gives the picture its motion and bite.

The flask, battered cans and scattered clothes give the scene its grim grit and yet the image is so incandescent with energy I can’t help but smile, laugh, be uplifted by it. This image and the resultant book have given so many people that goosebumps moment. ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ was instrumental in my photographic and visual education, a work whose reality although brutal was also beautiful and transcendental.

(I can’t be sure no cats were harmed in the making of this picture).