131 - Roger Ballen
© Roger Ballen
Born in New York in 1950, Roger Ballen is a unique and influential American artist whose strange and extreme photographic works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.
For nearly 40 years, Roger has lived and worked in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. His five decade career to date began in the documentary tradition but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Marginalized people, animals, found objects, wires and childlike drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Roger’s images. He describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.
Robert Young coined the term "Ballenesque" to refer to the constituent factors of Ballen's work in their "various shifting combinations and relations” that mark and identify it as uniquely his.
In his 20s, uninterested in the idea of commercial photography, Roger set about deciding on a career for himself and elected to pursue geology. He enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he received a PhD in Mineral Economics in 1981. He permanently settled in Johannesburg in 1982, where he worked as a self-employed mining entrepreneur until 2010. This profession took him into the South African countryside in which he travelled to remote small villages called "dorps" and rural areas referred to as the "platteland", in which he photographed the marginalized white population who, once privileged by Apartheid, were now isolated and economically deprived.
At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. The occupants and interiors, with their distinctive collections of objects, within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind.
After 1994, Roger no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg. Throughout the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Roger in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.
The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by dolls or dummy parts or, where people did appear, it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals.
His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen has been the creator of a number of acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series’. The collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the cult band Die Antwoord in 2012, has had over 150 million views on YouTube.
Thames & Hudson recently published a large volume of Roger’s collected photography with extended commentary by Roger entitled Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective.
Roger has had over fifty exhibitions worldwide, and his work is represented in many museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013 the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution presented a major retrospective of his work, to critical aclaim. Halle Saint Pierre in Paris opened an exhibition in September 2019 entitled The World According to Roger Ballen. His work takes over the entire space for a full year and is due to close in August this year.
In 2018, Roger received an Honorary Doctorate in Art and Design from Kingston University. In 2008, the Roger Ballen Foundation was founded to promote the advancement of education of photography in Africa. From later this year, once the building work can be resumed and completed, it will be housed in the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Art, Forest Town, Johannesburg.
On episode 131, Roger discusses, among other things:
The drawing he’s been doing during lockdown
Thrivig in chaos and confusion
Being part of the 60s counter culture
How the early death of his mother hit him hard
His five year global trip and why it wouldn’t be possible now
Why he began a career in geology
How he took his famous portrait of twins Dresie and Casie
Animals and some of the other recurring motifs in his work
How his collaboration with cult band Die Antwoord has had 150 millions views on YouTube
His response to accusations of exploitation
His recent transition to digital colour
Referenced:
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