Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh is a historically significant and groundbreaking photobook. Capturing the raw, chaotic and often shocking reality of life with alcoholism and poverty, it became a cornerstone of the Young British Artists movement, offering an intimate and controversial portrayal of 1990s Britain. This has made both the original 1996 edition and later reissues highly sought after. The 2024 Mack Books reissue restores Billingham’s original vision, featuring unseen images and revised sequencing to offer a complete version of the work that has never been seen before.
The project and the resulting book are considered vital works from the YBA generation — a significant cultural movement of the 1990s. Its stark, unvarnished depiction of a working-class family was revolutionary, challenging conventional approaches to photojournalism and art. The book contains intensely personal and often disturbing images of Billingham’s family, focusing on their lives marked by alcoholism, poverty and domestic struggles. Billingham’s decision to photograph his family in such an intimate and unflinching manner sparked considerable debate and criticism, ensuring the work’s controversial and memorable status.
Ray’s a Laugh provides an enduring and unsettling insight into the lives of people struggling on the margins of 1990s British society. The first edition, published in 1996 by Walter Keller/Scalo, is particularly valuable due to its historical importance and limited production. We have the 2024 extended special edition by Mack Books, complete with print as published in unopened edition number 186/250.
Renowned writer and fotoMagazin-Editor Damian Zimmermann about the differences of the Scalo book and the 2024 Mack edition: “Now, 28 years later, the book has been reissued and has little in common with the original, which was published by Scalo Verlag. At 320 pages long, the new edition is more than three times the length of the 1996 book, taking its time to introduce the protagonists. It begins with a prologue of calm black-and-white portraits of Ray. In the original version, released in 1996, viewers were visually punched in the gut several times within the first ten photos. All the familiar ‘highlights’ from the original version are present, as well as many nuances and quiet sections showing Ray sleeping or pensive. […] There is a simple reason why these two editions are so far apart. Richard Billingham rejected the book. Walter Keller from Scalo Verlag disregarded the dummy books created with Julian Germain and Michael Collings, instead completely redesigning and printing the book without obtaining approval. While this would soon go down in the history of photography, for Billingham, the book had become nothing more than a collection of sensational images. ‘Come on, Julian. I’ve got to sell this fucking book,’ wrote Walter Keller to Germain at the time by way of justification. He was right, but that didn’t make the result any better for Billingham, who has now published his own version. In the film industry, this would probably be referred to as a director’s cut.”
Get the PDF of Zimmermann’s essay (German) about the 2024 edition here.
See the March 2024 special edition here at Mack Books.
Embossed linen hardcover and a signed and numbered hand-made print, housed in a slipcase with a tipped-in image
Print size: 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), ISBN 978-1915743329SE
