Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen - Untitled

Técnica: Archival Pigment Print

Biografía del Artista: Roger Ballen is a South African artist and photographer born in New York in 1950. He is known for his black and white photographs that explore themes of marginalization, madness and death. He moved to South Africa in the 1970s and began photographing the margins of South African society, including marginalized people and abandoned places. Ballen has published several photography books and has exhibited his work in major galleries and museums around the world. He has also directed music videos and worked in collaboration with artists from different disciplines. In his work, Ballen uses photography as a medium to explore the human psyche and the darkest corners of society, creating powerful and provocative images.

"Roger Ballen in Color" is the official release of the artist/photographer's work in color. For the first time, after shooting exclusively in black and white for over fifty years, the images of this important and original photographer will be seen in a new way. These photographs have been created over the last two years and were all taken in Johannesburg, South Africa, in an environment that can best be described as "Ballenesque." Since the mid-1990s, my photographic practice has evolved from the use of basic home sets in the Outland series (2001) to sporadic drawings in Shadow Chamber (2005) to a more elaborate visual dynamic in Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014). The period since the publication of Asylum of the Birds has been characterized by the transformation of my work from something documentary to one that integrates other media such as drawing, painting and sculpture through photography. At the same time, I became increasingly involved in video, installation, collage, and painting. My goal in working in these other mediums was, and remains, to produce parallel art forms that expand on each other to generate a broad, encompassing aesthetic. In 2016, Leica provided me with a digital camera to shoot a video to be released with my Thames & Hudson publication “Ballenesque, Roger Ballen. A Retrospective.” When I started this project, I began using the camera for color stills and video. I was immediately amazed and inspired by the results which I believe have not only expanded my work specifically, but also the field of photographic art. While the images I proposed are shot in color, it might be more accurate to state that they are “muted” or occupy an aesthetic place between monochrome and color. As color by its very nature is seen as real and my photographs have an unreal and dreamlike appearance, and in these latter photographs an enigmatic visual relationship is recreated. It is clear to me that I inhabit an anomalous position as an outsider and an insider. I consider myself an insider in the sense that I am well educated, well traveled, and aware of the nuances of the photographic/artistic world. In my daily routine, I move from order to chaos, from routine to collapse, from organization to subversion… living in Johannesburg, South Africa as a First World person, while in a few minutes I can travel to what could be characterized as the Third World. The places where I work are often violent, socially chaotic places. People who have served time in prisons, mental institutions, who are facing difficult situations or who are just struggling to feed themselves, dominate my world. The spaces in which I work and which are revealed in my images can be defined as unconscious visual embodiments of the psyche. It is clear to me that most people who see my photographs experience the fact that, in an inexplicable way, these images end up lodged in their subconscious.