Recently I’ve been photographing women on billboards, and doing self-portraits.” He also wants to make more short films, like the two videos he is showing at Anthony Reynolds, showing people smoking in reverse, so that the smoke curls back into their mouths like in a video rewind. “People always say `what next’? But I do lots of different things at any time. I have tried to make them as personal as portraits.” Then he says, by way of reminder, “People think all I’ve ever done is show my family, but I do other things.”He’d now actively like to get public recognition for something else. They are of background parts of the Stourbridge landscape, little car parks, a suburban waste ground, a mundane red-brick corner, a bus stop with a vandalised bench: like scenes of a crime, or places where school children sit “They are places I might have passed on the way to school. They’re photographs of my family and they’re poor and haven’t got much money and everything, but my emotions are the same.”In the West End pub where we meet, he brings out a Daler book with some new photographs, a few of which are exhibited at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery “They’re not so immediate,” he says, almost apologetically. “The other students came from secure backgrounds financially and spiritually So I didn’t let on at first.

Then I felt, sod it, why should I hide? This is my mum and dad. Then Billingham went on to the University of Sunderland to study fine art. He took his cache of family photos, the idea being to use them to paint from. “I didn’t think of them as art,” he says, and, for a short while, he didn’t admit he was related to the subjects. “I do what I have to do.”He always wanted to be an artist but decided to do sciences at A-level, to ensure a job, and because he liked the idea of acquiring a scientific, logical mind to make sense of “the woolly subject of art”. I didn’t speak to anybody until I went to university.” His parents left him to his own devices and, as he puts it, “no one saw me.

Sometimes I’d wish I had parents like other kids, who had the knowledge or backing to say do this or that.” But at least this experience has left him with a singular if insular attitude. “One producer was so persuasive she drove all the way to see me, even though she knew I wasn’t interested.”One senses that Billingham has always felt a little bit separate, a bit estranged from the crowd “When I was a teenager I never went out I stopped in my room studying books, that’s all I did. He quickly sussed out that they were interested in their picturesque dilapidation and said no. “I like parties, and I like looking at work, but I don’t feel part of the art world.” Perhaps he’ll move to Brighton, where his social-worker girlfriend lives.His home is “about four miles away” from his parents, but he will not divulge where they live.

“I don’t want people going there or nothing like that.” After Ray’s A Laugh some TV companies called to ask him if they could make a documentary on his family. I still haven’t learnt to drive, bought a sports car or anything like that.” Nor does he lig around the art scene. “If I took photographs in London, they’d look just like tourist photographs.” He has not become flashy “I’m still the same. When I ask what he earns, Billingham says “Enough to get a mortgage” – on a house in a suburb of Stourbridge. “I was born in the area and I have an affinity with it and I feel comfortable making my work here,” he says. I look for real warmth and love in the work.” His pictures take part of their power from the emotive universality of the family snapshot.

As he remarks, everybody has taken photographs, “especially of their family”.One should not get the Billingham story out of perspective; after all, it is low key compared with the meteoric rise of some rock stars. Sometimes women look at the book and they cry and I think, `I’ve done it.’ I just want to move the viewer as much as possible.”Compassion is the buzz word in most appraisals of Billingham’s work, though others have presumed he is emotionally uninvolved – after all, he was able to take a photograph of his father lying on the toilet floor But he works to avoid cuddly sentimentality “That’s not art Sentimentality is false emotions. What you first see is the emotion.” He tried to correct her, saying that he had never even voted, but she argued that that was “political in itself” and he gave up.Does he feel patronised by these contrivances? “I’ve always wanted to move people as much as I can, so much that they cry. There’s emotional meaning to them.” In Edinburgh he gave a lecture and a tutor kept calling his work “political” “I never thought that when I was doing them There’s politics there but it’s secondary. “I don’t like it when people write stuff like that,” he says “It shows they’re not looking hard enough.