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.
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