Richard Billingham (born 25 September 1970) is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere. Billingham is best known for the Photobook Ray's A Laugh (1996), which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother Liz. He has also published the collections Black Country (2003), Zoo (2007), and Landscapes, 2001–2003 (2008). He has made several short films, including Fishtank (1998) and Ray (2016). Billingham adapted the latter into his first feature film, Ray & Liz (2018), a memoir of his childhood. He won the 1997 Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (now Deutsche Börse Photography Prize) and was shortlisted for the 2001 Turner Prize. His work is held in the permanent collections of Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Government Art Collection in London. Billingham lives in Swansea on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales and holds professorships at Middlesex University and the University of Gloucestershire. Career Billingham was born in Birmingham and studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath, a body of work later added to and published in the acclaimed book Ray's A Laugh (1996). The photos were originally intended as studies for paintings. However, a tutor at Sunderland University came across them in a plastic bag and encouraged Billingham to display them as is. Ray's a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation in which he grew up. Billingham chose to use the cheapest film and development he could find. Ray, his father, and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, with the alcoholic father drunk on his home brew, and the mother, an obese chain smoker with an apparent fascination for nicknacks and jigsaw puzzles. However, there is such integrity in this work that Ray and Liz ultimately shine through as troubled yet deeply human and touching personalities. The critic Julian Stallabrass describes Ray and Liz as embodiments of "what is in legend a particularly British stoicism and resilience, in the face of the tempest of modernity." In 1996, Billingham had an exhibition at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, UK. In 1997, he was included in the exhibition