Family

'Family' means different things to different people. As part of this course we are required to take photographs of our family in the style of a documentary to show what they are really like. Richard Billingham is a famous photographer who did exactly this. Here are some of his images...

This is an image of Richard's mother and father together. The way that his father is slumped in his chair looking own suggests that he has been drinking yet again. His mother looks like she is yelling at him and after watching Richard's documentary 'Fish tank', we learn that this happened very often.

This image shows us his father falling over as he is too drunk to stand up. As his father was an alcoholic it is fair to assume that this is what he was like the majority of the time.

This is another image to depict his father being drunk. He has fallen asleep on the floor next to the toilet. From these images we can imagine that life in his house was based around his father being drunk all the time and the rest of the family having to deal with his addiction to alcohol.

These images really portray what life was like in his home and this is what i want to achieve.

Another artist who did this sort of photography is Martin Parr, although, unlike Billingham, he took pictures from outside of the family (other people's families). Where Richard Billingham was just responding to family situations with his images, Martin Parr was also trying to show the British working class for what they really where. Here are some of his images...

In this image there is a person lying on a towel sunbathing whilst a small child plays. There is an element of danger in this image as they are next to a crane, which is unusual as they are at the beach. There are many leading lines in this image which all point to the sea, yet we focus on the situation at the foreground of the image.

In this image the woman is serving ice-cream to the children at the counter. The children all look impatient and the shopkeeper looks rather surly.

In this image you can see a family sitting near a full bin. Instead of the bin being emptied there is rubbish all over the floor around it. The family don't look like they are having a very good time as the mother and father look slightly annoyed and there is one child who looks like they are having a tantrum.

Art critique David Lee criticized Parr for his patronizing and exploitative view of the British working class:

"Parr has habitually discovered visitors at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding containers and wrappers with an abandon likely to send a liberal conscience into paroxysms of sanctimony. Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience. They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity. They wear cheap flashy clothes and in true conservative fashion are resigned to their meager lot. Only babies and children survive ridicule and it is their inclusion in many pictures which gives Parr's acerbic  vision of hopelessness its poetic touch."

Robert Morris wrote in the British journal of photography: "This is a clammy, claustrophobic nightmare world where people lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools, and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.” 

In response to all this criticism, Parr quoted: “I was rather surprised there was a controversy. It didn’t seem to me to be a controversial subject. It was a rundown seaside resort in Britain. What’s the surprise in that?”

I agree with Parr. Britain, being a very class conscious country, over reacted to these images. I don't think that Martin Parr was criticizing the British working class purposefully.

My Family

These are the images that i took of my family...

This is my younger brother Ellis. He really enjoys doing his own drawings in his free time, but for some reason he always does them on the stairs. In this image he is putting his name on his drawing and i think that this is an appropriate image because he spends the majority of his time doing art.

This is an image of my Mother on the phone. At first glance it doesn't look like it shows what she is like whatsoever, but it does. My Father works 12 hour shifts as a security guard so the only contact they have most of the time is through the phone. This is why there are no images of my Father included in this project.

This is my older brother Jack. He likes to steal tobacco off my mum.

This is my fish. His name is finger and i won him at sherdley. My little brother absolutely loves him.

In this image my brothers are messing around. I took a photo of this because they are usually arguing with each other so them two having fun together is a rare occurrence.

The next two images are linked. In this image my Mum has just opened a letter...

...and in this image she is stressed out. I don't know what the letter was but my mum does tend to worry about everything.

My little brother is smiling almost all of the time when he is at home so i thought i would capture it from above as he is younger than me.

In this image he got confused as to what face to pull so he just looks natural which never usually happens.

This shows my little brother for what he is really like at home. Always pulling funny faces, trying to make other people laugh and constantly full of energy.

Before my Grandad died he bought my older brother this guitar. When he did jack spent a whole summer teaching himself how to play it. This is an image of him at his band practice doing what he does best. There wasn't many opportunities for my to take pictures of him as he spends all of his spare time at the gym.