Join Richard Billingham at the ICA for a very special event to mark the launch of the new edition of Ray’s a Laugh, including a screening of his feature-film debut Ray & Liz, an unsettling family portrait set in Thatcher-era Britain. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Richard Billingham and writer and curator Sacha Craddock. The launch will also include a book signing.
Ray & Liz is the first feature film by Turner Prize-nominated and Deutsche Börse Prize-winning photographer Richard Billingham. Focusing on his chaotic upbringing in the West Midlands in the early 1980s, the film revisits the subjects of his photobook Ray’s a Laugh, first published in 1996 to enormous acclaim and restored in a new edition, including a distinct approach to sequencing and numerous unseen images.
Tickets available here
Tuesday 26 March
18:30pm GMT
Institue of Contemporary Arts
12 Carlton House Terrace
London
SW1Y 5AH
About Ray’s a Laugh
First published in 1996, Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh is one of the most significant photobooks of the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a cornerstone work of the Young British Artists generation. Formed of starkly intimate images of Billingham’s often chaotic parental home under the heavy effects of alcoholism and poverty, the book was produced in the 1990s with editors Michael Collins and Julian Germain. This new edition restores Billingham’s original vision for his deeply personal work for the first time. Including numerous unseen images and a distinct approach to sequencing inflected by Billingham’s training as a painter: it constitutes a ‘director’s cut’ and reintroduces a vital and consistently challenging work for a new era.
The publication of this new edition is accompanied by Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader, edited by Liz Jobey, which traces the book’s compelling history from Billingham’s ‘discovery’ at Sunderland University, through his Turner Prize nomination, to the present reworked edition.
Find out more here
