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Roger Ballen - Artist Talk
Video produced by Caddie Brain and Tega Brain from COFA Online
About Roger Ballen
Born 1950 in New York, USA
Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa
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. Ballen has gone on to amass a large body of photographic works that record the human faces of this vanishing world; their strangeness, marginalisation and underlying violence evoking the work of Diane Arbus. 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. The scenes manipulate reality and fiction, where both inanimate and animate subjects play out strange, incoherent dramas for the benefit of Ballen’s lens.
