Early in the 1990s, Richard Billingham rewrote the rules of the visual memoir, documenting his family with an appalled affection.
Billingham’s disreputable dad Ray has a mirror personality in Scobie from Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, first book:
Scobie is getting on for seventy and still afraid to die; his one fear is that he will awake one morning and find himself lying dead. Consequently it gives him a severe shock every morning when the water-carriers shriek under his window before dawn, waking him up. For a moment, he says, he dare not open his eyes. Keeping them fast shut (for fear that they might open on a heavenly host or the cherubims hymning) he gropes along the cake-stand beside his bed and grabs his pipe. It is always loaded from the night before and an open matchbox stands beside it. The first whiff of seaman’s plug restores both his composure and his eyesight. He breathes deeply, grateful for the reassurance. He smiles. He gloats. …
He places his wrinkled fingers to his chest and is comforted by the sound of his heart at work, maintaining a tremulous circulation in that venous system whose deficiencies (real or imaginary I do not know) are only offset by brandy in daily and all-but lethal does. He is rather proud of his heart.
Billingham went from shooting pictures of his nearest and dearest to photographing at the zoo, not a large leap. He’s in the current exhibit at Western Bridge.
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