Fleeing the parents

Photography review: Richard Billingham

Critics frequently moan about artists who never seem prepared to take risks, who continue producing successful set pieces year in year out. But if the work that propelled them to art stardom managed to touch a nerve, as Richard Billingham's did, then this is usually accompanied by an undeniable regret when they finally decide it's time to move on.

'I do all these shows and they always want the same images,' Billingham complained, before being nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001. For that exhibition, he showed nondescript photographs of Cradley Heath, the creepily desolate area of Birmingham where Billingham grew up.

They were nothing like the work that made him famous: those intimate and compelling photographs of his drunken father Ray and his fat, tattooed mother, Liz. Those turned the middle-classes into reluctant voyeurs; Cradley Heath just made them yawn, and then shake their heads in bewilderment.

Billingham is now in a position of trying to find a signature. With those earlier landscapes, he failed. Unlike Ray and Liz, they could have been taken by anyone who could hold a camera straight.

But in these recent photographs, taken in Pakistan, Ethiopia and the South Downs, we do find him edging towards a sense of authorship once again - a strong eye for composition makes them quite 'painterly'. And though this is not enough to make them special, they are stronger than earlier landscapes. Maybe we just have to wait and see where this leads him now.