In 1987, worried that “too many children and people” had begun looking to society and hence to the government to solve their problems — e.g., “I am homeless, the Government must house me” — Margaret Thatcher famously denied there was such a thing as society. “Who is society?” she asked. “There is no such thing.”

At that moment, seventeen-year-old Richard Billingham’s father had lost his job, his family had lost their home, and they were in fact being housed by the government. And Richard was starting to take the photographs of his father, Ray, mother, Liz, and brother, Jason, that were published in 1996 as Ray’s a Laugh. This book — emanating from those conditions — was a sensation. Twenty-eight years on, the hardship that Billingham depicted has hardly changed.

In these circumstances, Billingham’s pictures of his family in their council flat — Ray literally falling down drunk, Liz with clenched fists apparently berating Ray, both of them with blood on their faces — can hardly help being seen as in some sense a record of the ravages of neoliberalism. But Billingham himself has been eager to make it clear that “he had no documentary purpose, no wish to illustrate, say the effects of poverty, drink, or whatever.” And that disclaimer has been convincing to most viewers — both to those who have thought of the disconnect from documenting Thatcherism as a problem (the great American photographer and conceptual artist Martha Rosler criticized Billingham’s indifference to the “social”) and to the many more who have thought of the work as “remarkable” because it refuses to devote itself to the “boilerplate social and political implications of a family struggling at or below subsistence level.”

But if we remember that Thatcher’s exasperation with people who looked for aid from “society” took the form not only of denying there was such a thing but of naming what there is instead — “There are individual men and women and there are families” — we can see that actually there’s no disconnect from Thatcherism at all. Just the opposite. Ray, Liz, and Jason perform in Billingham’s art exactly the function they provide in Thatcher’s sociology; they are the individual men and women, members of his family, who replace “society.”

And if Thatcher’s enthusiasm for individuals and the family could be read as a mission statement for the entire genre of the contemporary memoir (which is nothing if not the literature of individuals, their families, and maybe their friends, and which is proving to be for the decline of the middle class what the novel was for its rise), Ray’s a Laugh makes vivid photography’s distinctive contribution to the genre.

Think, for example, of the difference made to the photo of a man falling down drunk by the fact that the man in question is your dad. To begin with, you only get the opportunity to take that picture because you live with him; intimacy is the default position of the relation between photographer and subject. That means that the kinds of “boilerplate” questions that the “documentary” might raise (for example, how can society solve the problem of drunkenness?) can (as family replaces society) be turned into more compelling ones like, would you take (and show and sell) a picture of your dad, falling down drunk? Or, conversely, into admiration for the respect the son has shown his subject by declining to see him as an example of a social problem and seeing him instead as an individual.

Rosler’s unhappiness with Billingham’s indifference to the “social” led her to characterize the pictures as an “invitation to voyeurism” since “without a sense of the social, only the personal remains.” But the transformation of the social into the personal goes beyond voyeurism to produce a whole range of ethical questions and answers: instead of what should “society” do about alcoholism, what does the son owe the father? And what does the son owe the father whose alcoholism and inability to hold his job landed them in the council tower in the first place?

This is a way of asking, what does the father owe the son? And then what does the father think of the use the son has made of him? Should Richard need Ray’s and Liz’s permission to take (let alone publish) these pictures? Does the fact that, in the event, they seem not to have minded, make it OK? Is Richard’s own response to this question — “I don’t owe them anything” — exculpatory or just the opposite? More generally, how should we understand the ethical and affective relation of the photographer to their subject?

The intimacy of family relations foregrounds these questions, making it possible for pictures that seemed to Rosler an invitation to voyeurism (because they show the viewer what ordinarily only the son would see) to look to a reviewer in Art Forum like expressions of love and even “filial piety” — which was, he thought, the only thing that “makes the pictures worth the attention of the rest of us.” And if there’s a certain sense in which these responses — betrayal vs. filial piety — are obviously contradictory, there’s a more important sense in which they aren’t. The power of Billingham’s pictures is not to compel a choice between the alternatives, it’s to make sure that it doesn’t really matter which one we choose. Either way (betrayal or filial piety), when family takes the place of “society,” social problems are turned into personal problems.

In this sense, the great accomplishment of Ray’s a Laugh is that everyone in it, down to the dog and cat, is made vivid as an individual by being pictured as a member of the family instead of “society.” Or, to put the point in a slightly different way, a member of a family instead of a member of the working class. Society structured by the opposition between labor and capital — which is to say, by class struggle — is what Thatcher’s appeal to families was meant to negate. That’s why these pictures of poor people living in devastated de-industrial England are precisely not pictures of the working class. Years later, talking about his movie Ray and Liz, Billingham would say that when he saw “films representing the working class or people on the dole,” they didn’t “feel real” to him. Whereas what he wanted in the film was “to show what the domestic environment genuinely looked like.” It’s by running the working class through the “domestic environment” that you get the distinctive effect of the neoliberal real, of individuals who belong to families rather than to classes.

Indeed, as Michel Foucault correctly saw, the great ambition of neoliberalism was to eliminate the very idea of class: in his words, to redescribe workers as “entrepreneurs” of themselves and wages as “income allotted to a certain capital.” In the words of California’s Proposition 22, it was to replace the idea of a society structured by the opposition between capital (like the owners of Uber) and labor (like Uber drivers) with contractual arrangements between “independent contractors,” making good or bad investments, good or bad decisions.

As viewers (members of other families), we will have different evaluations of Ray and Liz and Richard’s investments. In a paper called “Health as Human Capital,” for example, the Chicago economist Gary Becker (whom Foucault much admired) argued that addiction “to activities that lower utility at older ages, such as heavy drinking, hard drugs” is not so bad “if the probability of surviving to older ages is relatively low.” Given Ray’s circumstances, we might, following Becker, respect his alcoholism as a reasonable “investment.” And, in fact, a standard understanding of these pictures is that Billingham has “used his art career to grant dignity to his folks.” But there is no dignity in capital’s exploitation of labor. It’s only the transformation of capital and labor into individuals and their families, and of all human activities (working or drinking) into different ways of investing human capital that makes dignity the central concern.

Of course, Billingham hardly understands himself as taking pictures of human capital, much less defending neoliberal economics. His “intention,” he said (in 1996) was not to be “political” but to make work that is “as spiritually meaningful as I can make it.” That description — spirituality instead of political economy — doesn’t sound as unpolitical as it’s supposed to when we remember that Thatcher herself had understood her policies as a spiritual exercise: “economics are the method,” she said, “the object is to change the soul.” But Billingham is an artist, and he also says what Thatcher didn’t — that he wanted “the images to be aesthetically moving.”

We can begin to see how he understands the difference between politically or ethically moving and aesthetically moving by noting that Billingham characteristically identifies taking his first photos — e.g., of his father passed out on the floor — with his desire to make art out of them: “Watching him lying there, I started to think in terms of composition . . . so I took photographs to preserve the image.” His original thought was to make paintings out of them, which he didn’t end up doing because the photographs came to seem aesthetically moving precisely because they themselves produced the effect of composition.

For example, a crucial difference between seeing your father (or in this case, your brother) passed out on the floor and seeing an “image” of your brother passed out on the floor is that the image has sets of relations the real life sight of him doesn’t have — Billingham’s brother’s left arm is closer to the frame than his right arm and his legs below the knee are cut off by the frame altogether, so the focus of the picture is very much on his naked torso. And those relations are produced not by the world (which has no frame and doesn’t focus) but by the photographer.

In other words, the image is made aesthetic by being composed and it is composed by being framed. So, the interest in composition is an interest in the frame and the interest in the frame is an interest in the aesthetic. And, in fact, throughout the book, we can see a certain pressure systematically put on the frame — thematically in Billingham’s interest in pictures of windows, physically (at the level of the construction of the book itself) in the contrast between the two-page photos that bleed to the edge of each page (so either they are read as having no frame or the edge of the page is called upon to function as a frame) and the single-page photos, which are, emphatically framed — they don’t bleed to the edge and are usually positioned facing a completely blank page.

More ought to be said about the structure of the book but in order to feel the particular force of Billingham’s aesthetic, we can just focus on the relation between his commitment to “composition” and the frame and his interest in an element that’s not reducible to either: color. Ray’s a Laugh contains many more colors than black and white, but when thinking about which pictures work and which don’t, Billingham has suggested that color is in a certain sense secondary, that a mark of the photos that work best is that “if you take the colour away . . . the structure . . . is still there.” And just by looking at the pictures ourselves, we can begin to see not only that for him structure is somehow more fundamental than color but that it exists in a certain tension with color.

Take this picture of Liz doing a jigsaw puzzle. She’s wearing a dress of many colors that takes up most of the top half of the picture and that produces a version of the effect also produced by the wallpaper behind her, which you can see in this other picture of her stretched out on the couch. The picture on the couch is a two-page bleed, no frame. The puzzle picture, by contrast, is organized vertically rather than horizontally, and it’s on a single page, framed. The image of Liz on the couch gets its structure from the shape of her body; immediately readable as an odalisque, it creates its own frame.

But Liz doing the puzzle is only framed by Billingham, that is, by the photo, and it doesn’t quite work. Instead it’s as if all the stuff in her house is embodied in (rather than excluded from) her dress, which flows over into the tattoos and to the various things beside and behind her, an effect of boundarylessness that’s insisted upon by the puzzle box she holds in her lap. Because although the puzzle box is itself a kind of frame, here everything inside it is just an intensified version of everything outside it. Rather than creating a structure, it seems to testify to the impossibility of doing so.

But if the top half of the photo looks like a kind of failure, the bottom half (marked by both the edge of the table and the puzzle) turns the top into part of a narrative; she’s pulling pieces out of the box to place in the puzzle she’s working on on the table in front of her. And she’s already produced a completely legible frame that (in contrast to the box) not only structures the space within it (the puzzle itself), but also structures the space in the photo (demarcating what’s part of the puzzle from what isn’t).

So if the picture of Liz in the top half is the problem — she’s the embodiment of color without structure — the picture of what she’s been doing in the bottom half — color structured by a frame — is the solution. Sticking with Billingham’s insistence on aesthetics rather than politics, we could say that this is a picture of structure trying to overcome color, a real allegory of the effort to make something “aesthetically moving.”

Except that this aesthetic ambition has also been a political one all along. We began by noting  that both Billingham’s indifference to politics and his audience’s enthusiasm for that indifference (Lynn Barber, for example, praising the way Billingham’s family was “not presented as social problems but as riotously colourful individuals”) express a commitment to a fundamentally Thatcherite construction of Ray and Liz’s world, that is, a world in which the basic structure of a capitalist society (its division by class) is denied and replaced by a transformation of that structure into the relations between members of families and the freely chosen exchanges between individuals, independent contractors making contracts.

Billingham’s refusal to make pictures of social problems (of victims of capitalism, which is to say, of the working class) is an example of what the social scientist Dieter Pluhwe is talking about when he says that neoliberals “usually deny the existence of social inequality rooted in the capitalist class structure and instead prefer to speak of the diversity of individuals and other groups.” In this reading, Ray’s a Laugh has a politics after all, not the politics of complaining about social problems but the politics of refusing to see the problems as social — in effect, the politics of the New Labour variant of Thatcherism into which the book was first welcomed.   

But we’ve also begun to see that Billingham’s desire to make something aesthetically rather than socially or politically moving can be understood not just as a form of complicity with individuals and their families but, in its commitment to structure, as the imagination of an alternative. For example, the question of the frame in the photo of Liz doing her puzzle is not reducible to the ethics of photographing your mother. Rather, the photo ignores the questions of family ethics. More important, it doesn’t so much ignore as seek to overcome even the question of working-class identity. Liz’s dress, her tattoos, the couch she’s sitting on can all lend themselves to being read as the markers of such an identity.

But social class turned into an identity is just one of the many “groups” on whose unequal treatment neoliberals “prefer” to blame inequality, in contrast to blaming it on “inequality rooted in the class structure.” Whereas Billingham’s frame, separating what’s in the picture from what’s not, organizes the world formally; the crucial thing about Liz’s dress in the picture is not that it’s the sort of thing a working-class woman would wear but that it embodies a kind of overflowing of the frame, a resistance to structure. And that the picture’s effort to produce a structure is oppositional — it’s produced as a kind of antagonism between what’s in the frame and what isn’t, or even an antagonism between framing and not framing.

Furthermore, in the edges of the puzzle below, not only does the picture look for a way to insist on the frame, it even (on the right-hand side) seeks to imagine the frame extending beyond the picture itself, as if it could not only structure the picture but structure the world outside it. In fact, the structure is so strong that both the surface of the table and the coffee mug — which obviously don’t belong to the puzzle — are assimilated into it.

It’s as if the erasure of class struggle embodied in Thatcher’s picture of a world composed of individuals and their families appears in Billingham’s picture on the level of content but, in his own commitment to an aesthetic of “composition” and to structure as opposition, is resisted on the level of form. And this resistance is political not because it advocates for some particular political position (on drunkenness or even on homelessness) but because it presents a picture of society — of a world structured by the conflict between capital and labor rather than by the good and bad investments of individuals and their families.