Ray’s a Laugh, 28 Years Later

In 1987, worried that “too many children and people” had begun looking to society and hence to the government to solve their problems — e.g., “I am homeless, the Government must house me” — Margaret Thatcher famously denied there was such a thing as society. “Who is society?” she asked. “There is no such thing.”

At that moment, seventeen-year-old Richard Billingham’s father had lost his job, his family had lost their home, and they were in fact being housed by the government. And Richard was starting to take the photographs of his father, Ray, mother, Liz, and brother, Jason, that were published in 1996 as Ray’s a Laugh. This book — emanating from those conditions — was a sensation. Twenty-eight years on, the hardship that Billingham depicted has hardly changed.

In these circumstances, Billingham’s pictures of his family in their council flat — Ray literally falling down drunk, Liz with clenched fists apparently berating Ray, both of them with blood on their faces — can hardly help being seen as in some sense a record of the ravages of neoliberalism. But Billingham himself has been eager to make it clear that “he had no documentary purpose, no wish to illustrate, say the effects of poverty, drink, or whatever.” And that disclaimer has been convincing to most viewers — both to those who have thought of the disconnect from documenting Thatcherism as a problem (the great American photographer and conceptual artist Martha Rosler criticized Billingham’s indifference to the “social”) and to the many more who have thought of the work as “remarkable” because it refuses to devote itself to the “boilerplate social and political implications of a family struggling at or below subsistence level.”

But if we remember that Thatcher’s exasperation with people who looked for aid from “society” took the form…