ROGER BALLEN

Born 1950 in New York, USA. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Roger Ballen, Head inside shirt, 2001, selenium toned, silver gelatin print, 40 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Born in New York City in 1950, Roger Ballen gained a degree in psychology before travelling the world. After six years abroad, he completed a PhD in Mineral Economics and established himself as a geologist and mining consultant in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982; this work steered him toward the fringe communities of South Africa and it was here, in the poorest rural villages or dorps, he began taking traditional documentary photographs. Taking the human condition as his subject, Ballen has gone on to amass a large body of photographic works that reveal a unique vision. In the series ‘Dorps: Small towns of South Africa’ (1986), Ballen documented former mining towns, drawn by his love of architecture and unique interiors that keenly reflect their inhabitants. Travelling these semi-lawless, unvisited frontiers – hostile and welcoming by turns – Ballen observes the irony that South Africa’s struggling rural white communities are the ‘archetypes of alienation and immobility’ following the apartheid system created to secure their survival. His study culminated in ‘Platteland: Images from rural South Africa’ (1996), a vivid series of photographs recording the human faces of this vanishing world – it was this work that brought Ballen international acclaim; the strangeness, marginalisation and underlying violence of his images evoking the work of Diane Arbus. A greater collaboration with his subjects marks a shift in Ballen’s practice in ‘Outland’ (2001) and ‘Shadow Chamber’ (2005). Part-photojournalist, part-stage director, Ballen arranges artefacts, found objects and animals into unique compositions that coexist with his human subjects. In dishevelled surrounds, children and adults adopt darkly humorous poses: a naked man is wedged between a foam mattress, casually smoking (Engulfed, 2004); a ‘headless’ child plays with a dinosaur toy whilst burrowed under his shirt (Head inside shirt, 2001). The scenes play with reality and fiction, where both inanimate and animate subjects ostensibly stooge for Ballen’s lens.

The series ‘Boarding House’ (2009), set in a three-storey derelict warehouse in which homeless families are squatting, is the result of a five-year study. In these black-and-white photographs, Ballen expands his theatrical sensibility into the realms of painting and sculpture. The results are a rich visual collage, fraught with stained walls, ink blots, rabbits and snakes, art brut scrawlings, body parts, masks, twisted coat hangers and wire. In the claustrophobic surrounds, children play or stare blankly and adults poise mockingly as Ballen works wonder, play and imagination into the stage of poverty that is laid out in these images, presenting these forgotten people with a highly imaginative visibility and intriguing mystique.

puma.creative Mobility Award recipient.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010 ‘Roger Ballen: Photographs 1982–2009’, George Eastman House, Rochester, USA
2009 ‘Roger Ballen 1982–2008’, La Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy
2009 ‘Roger Ballen: Boarding House’, Gagosian Gallery, New York, USA
2007 ‘Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal – Roger Ballen Photography’, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
2006 ‘Ballen, In the Shadow Chamber’, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008 ‘After Nature’, New Museum, New York, USA
2008 ‘Untitled (Vicarious)’, Gagosian Gallery, New York, USA
2004 ‘Making Faces’, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, France
2002 ‘New Documentary Photography’, National Portrait Gallery, London and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK 

Selected Bibliography

Roger Ballen and Robert A Sobieszek, Shadow Chamber, Phaidon Press, London, 2005
Roger Ballen and David Travis, Roger Ballen: Boarding House, Phaidon Press, London, 2009
Robert Cook, ‘Brutal Tender Human Animal’, Photofile, no. 79, summer 2007
Darius Himes, ‘Behind the Mystery of Roger Ballen’s Art’, American Photo, vol. 20, no. 4, 2009,
Richard Pinsent, ‘Strange but nearly true: life in the Boarding House’, The Art Newspaper, issue 205, September 2009