In 1996 a book of photographs by a young, unknown British photographer reached the London contemporary art market and was received, almost at once, as both a popular success and a provocation. The pictures had been made inside a Birmingham council flat, in the close, disorderly rooms where the photographer’s father, Ray, an alcoholic, lived with Liz, his mother, and his younger brother Jason.

Viewers accustomed to well-meaning photojournalism about working-class poverty found the work harder and nearer than they expected. Some saw exposure and betrayal; the subjects were family, and they had not agreed to being seen. Billingham’s own account runs the other way. He made the pictures as reference material for painting, and held that they carried no social or political programme. What they became in public owed as much to editors and gallerists as to him.

Ray’s a Laugh: A Reader, edited by Liz Jobey and published by MACK in 2024, follows that public life. Jobey’s opening essay draws on interviews with Billingham and figures involved in the work’s emergence, among them Michael Collins, Julian Germain and Paul Graham. An extensive selection of conversations and essays from 1996 to the present follows, with writing by Charlotte Cotton, Gordon Burn, Lynn Barber and Jim Lewis.

The book is a companion to the 2024 edition of Ray’s a Laugh that restores Billingham’s original conception of it. It belongs to MACK’s DISCOURSE series — small-format paperbacks in which a writer or artist works through a single subject at length — and at 160 pages and 12.5 by 19.5 cm, it is built to be read rather than leafed through.

Its interest for a collection lies in the record it assembles: the arguments, hesitations and editorial decisions through which a set of family photographs became one of the more debated bodies of work in British photography. Read on its own it is a history of dissemination; read beside the edition it accompanies, it changes how those pictures are seen.