Today, leafing through Roger Ballen’s 2005 publication Shadow Chamber, one becomes aware of an element that might have passed almost unnoticed when that book first came out. The photographer, whose book Outland had been published in 2001, opened this new volume with four images: a portrait, comparable to those that had initially brought attention to […]
The Roger Ballen Strategies
“I’ve always thought that a believable, genuinely realistic ambiguity constitutes the greatest form of expression. And for different reasons. Firstly, nobody likes the truth of what is going on to be explained to him. And what is perhaps even more important is that nobody actually knows what is real or what really is going on.” […]
Roger Ballen at the George Eastman House
Dream-sense can be unsettling in its dense, archetypal symbolism, and while some will argue that it’s nothing more than the brain defragging the mess of information it must process, it’s the sense that most interests Johannesburg, South Africa-based American photographer Roger Ballen, whose work can be seen at the George Eastman House through June 6.
Gagosian Gallery
No photographic, or even artistic, category quite encompasses the complicated, engrossing, and at times unsettling images in South Africa-based artist Roger Ballen’s new series Boarding House, 2003-2008, several dozen images from which made up this large exhibition.
The Visionary and Silent Theatre of Roger Ballen
Photography has always walked a crest between reality and fiction, maintaining a precarious balance which, depending upon the stylistic choices of the individual photographer, tilts now towards the documentary, now towards invention; now towards the world as it outwardly seems, now towards its reworking as part of a spatial and narrative construction devised by the […]
Boarding House
A photograph that defies notions of place, subject, or era, can become something quite unfamiliar. Photography’s visual reference points, rendered by the simple process of exposing film to light, map our perception of reality despite the concerns of modern and post-modern theory.
Roger Ballen in Conversation with Doug McClemont
When Roger Ballen talks about his body of work, it is seldom in terms of social commentary. If the personal history of one of his sitters seems unavoidable, Ballen addresses the narrative only in the broadest possible way. To the artist, the images of small-town South Africa contain interplay of light and dark, painterly lines […]
Roger Ballen: Uncanny Animals
Roger Ballen depict an abstracted imaginary space that is inhabited by both animals and people. Mostly within grey, barren cell-like structures, nightmarish scenarios, which are unspecific in their narrative, are enacted.
A Conversation with Roger Ballen
Chas Bowie is a writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon. He is the Arts Editor for the Portland Mercury, and his writings and photographs have appeared in publications such as Res, Anthem, Venus, and Tokion.
Interview with Roger Ballen
In the 90ties your photographs were more focussed on portraiture than today. Is it regardless still important for you to work in South Africa or could you realize these images everywhere?