The closeness between the works of Joel-Peter Witkin and Roger Ballen’s works trigger other gloomy other gloomy that create tuned dissonances. The atmosphere of a photograph penetrates the other that is placed next door, even at a distance of thousands of kilometers and years. The thread that links the images of the two American artists is a report of details and short circuits. Something similar to what happened in the iconological lessons of the late nineteenth century is put into action, where in the German universities of art history semantic kinships were shown between two or more works through a double projection of slides. Only in the relationship between the works of Witkin and Ballen also take shape new meats and other metamorphoses. As if you could put the photographs of the two artists on the panels of Aby Warburg to make the nightmares in Mnemosyne. In the double projection, the black mask binds John Behind a Man called Mashillo (2000) to Portrait of Joel, New Mexico (1984), the wings of hybrid beings fly from The Bird of Queveda, NM (1982) to Suspended (2012), or vice versa, the snake in Bitten (2004) sibila and connects to the anguiform fish placed on the head of the woman in Imperfect Thirst (2016), the flagellation of the Blackman, RomeAfrican-bornCovered in blankets, placed next to the white man in John and Roommates (1998), the disturbing hammers understood as instruments of offense are held in hand by the men present in Melvin Burkhart-Human Oddity, Florida (1985) and Herman with Hammer (1997), and so on through iconographic and sense relations between objects, people, animals, allusions and metaphors.

The images in the individual photographs make their meanings and coupled action open and further extend their delirious. They communicate through visual statements. They extend the process of dark life. On display, placed side by side, they become like mirrors that reflect shadows of consciousness, presences that are disturbing if people have not resolved the issues of their identity. Both the users, the authors and the subjects contained in the photos come from a space-time to return again to another dimension or into nothing. The crasis between the mated photographs, with freak characters or with monstrous beings, bring into the world something like a being manipulated by his own genetics. What can the user keep under control in front of these other figures that are formed through an imaginative copulation? Where do these other images come from? What alters in the consciousness of those who see them appear? Are they also products of biology, the environment, evolution, results of education, culture, an economic system? They are images that move something, which can have a profound influence on the subconscious. Or they enter the dreamlike textures, induce nightmares. Or they’re useful because they make you think. In any case, they move something and they don’t forget them easily. These are psychologically real images. The spectators know that those figures do not come from the day reality, but their subconscious will still be solicited by the perturbing that has been fixed in the photographs. Ballen thinks that these figures also have a role to move people’s consciences, even at the political level: “My photographs are political because people change. It is my opinion: there is no hope of improving, if people do not learn to integrate the unconscious into their lives. There is no hope without acquiring self-conscientious, because an unconscious that creates problems always leads to the same actions.

Ballen inserted signs and drawings in the scenes to get away from conscious reality. Over the decades, in a very gradual process, he has built his style by entering the interpenetration between photography and drawing. The integration between the two media outlets also included the rest of the elements inserted in the sets in a convincing unity, they extended the meaning of the works: “The drawings are not people, but at the same time represent them, they refer to them. They are symbols.” The artist establishes a strong connection between each element in the image, where photography is understood as a body in which all the details, figures and signs, are organs. You can use metaphors, but life is not as simple as a metaphor, it is a process where we are subjected to alternations, between the search for truth and disillusionment. The mystery of truth is not well-defined and it is childish to affirm a presumed truth in a simplistic way. Sometimes, through disillusionment, someone can find his path of truth. Someone else instead seeks in the darkness of consciousness the beating heart of things.

Joel-Peter Witkin, through the disturbing aesthetic of his tableaux (non) vivant, brings to the gazes of the users the appearance of images that emerged from the dark areas of consciousness, where beauty and eros are hidden behind the macabre and deformities, where the carnal and the transcendent mate as if they were inside the fertile misdemons of putrefaction. The figures live between licit and illicit, between female and male, on the border between life and death, in a condition of perennial ambiguity. Many Witkin’s iconographic typologies draw on the pictorial Vanitas and Memento mori of previous centuries, and bring in our time – an era full of uncertainties, alienation and monstrous presences – something that has always been in the human imagination. This apocalyptic imagery is kept at the same temperature as the salts where the dead wait to be vivisected in the morgues.

In many photographs, vulnerable and corruptible bodies seek to ascend to enjoyment and the sublime, letting themselves be seduced by the lure of vices, carnal sin, spiritual perversion and desecrated sacredness.

Witkin relies on an apotheosis of blasphemous and insubordination, to go beyond the concepts of redemption and condemnation. His fallen angels – dwarves, transvestites, freaks, hermaphrodites, aborted fetuses, deformed beings, crippled, derelicts from the unmade and torn bodies, impaired animals – are drawn into the vertigo of perdition. They ascend from a standstill, posing inside the set. They are on the border between life and death, fighting against the arrogant hypocrisy of the dominant vision of the consumer society, which has unbalanced everything towards what is apparently beautiful and good. In the apocalyptic visions the deformities of the body and the soul hit the gazes of the well-thinking.

Witkin loves exaggeration, redundant images, built with an acrid maniacal, emphasized in a staging that we would prefer not to live, where they continually loudly call death, the fear of being harassed by illness and the torture of pain and wounds, by the truth of our grotesque imperfection.

The medium chosen by Witkin is misleading. It is a firm-images of an inexorable process of decomposition. The figures live in theatrical spaces-times, photographed to leave a tangible document, a visionary proof of the transience of existence.

The decanting of the Dead Nature of the seventeenth-century painting in Witkin’s visionarily puts into action macabre substitutions, where the objects and symbols of the flowing time – candles, skulls, rotting fruit, powder-covered instruments, cut flowers – are combined with a grueling repertoire of human flesh and limbs detached from the bodies. Photography understood as an emblematic memento mori well accords with the transience of things and the deadly destiny of every living form.

The mystery and misery of the gloomy human condition these restless images induce ambivalent sensations and to many make their eyes distract from the gruesome, the diversity of the outcast monsters, by those who are affected by physical, psychic and behavioral anomalies. Witkin triggers a complex transfiguration, tuned to his inner torments, where tableaux vivants of anarchic and dissident marginalized and dissidents put into a circle disturbing prodromes.

The subjects and signs present in the black and white photographs of Roger Ballen, on the other hand, evoke the absurdity of the human condition and at the same time are recordings of a personal psychological journey of the author, testimonies of an imaginative but deeply troubled mind. The protagonists in the photographs are disinherited, black and white, many of whom are disabled or mentally unstable, taken up in the spaces of the elaborate sets in the abandoned houses of the South African cities where the poor were exiled.

The powerful two-tone B/N accentuates the difference between the visceral reality of faces and bodies and the elaborate settings where everything is pervaded by the dark grotesque of the hidden deep: “For me it is about being forced to a deeper psychological journey to make art. I always follow my instincts and try to deal with what is real and what is imagined. I’m going where the trip takes me. One thing is important: photography is far ahead of my conscious mind. When an image has a real strength, it seems that it can come out of the wall.”

Ballen follows the streets indicated by Carl Gustav Jung and Samuel Beckett, between the strength of the symbols and total silence, to probe the darkest recesses of his mind, also passing from voyeurism and the process of objectvaiization of the other individuals he encounters on his path to the abyss. In this journey he reflects very extremely on society in crisis.

What subversive potential is therefore present in the images of Witkin and Ballen, in the removed brought to the surface, beyond the first appearance of things and the spectacularization of freaks, beyond the deformity and nightmares of a world that terrorizes? What disturbing lenses are waiting to be put before our eyes?

Roger Ballen – Joel-Peter Witkin
THE UNCANNY LENS / The Disturbing Len
Castel Ivano (TN)
from 16 March to 13 April 2024

Catalogue Fallone Editore
curated by Fulvio de Pellegrin and Paolo Dolzan

On the cover: Joel-Peter Witkin, Still Life with Breast, Paris, 2001