Phaidon Press (5 Oct 2005): Since the late 1990s, Roger Ballen's work has moved away from the category of documentary photography into the realms of fiction. Though he continued to portray people on the fringes of South African society, his subjects began to act out dark and discomfiting tableaux, providing images that are exciting and disturbing but also contain flashes of dark humour. Ballen's most recent images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photography. There is no digital imaging involved: everything shown happened in front of the camera. The images are completely honest, and yet they are also fabricated. In Shadow Chamber, Ballen focuses on the interactions between the people, animals and objects that inhabit his unique image space. The rooms he photographs are actual places that we know exist, but they are unsettling and strange, logical but utterly impossible: their walls are covered with scribbled drawings, stains and dangling wires, the floors are strewn with bizarre props and artefacts. Dogs, rabbits and kittens wander into the frame or are stuffed into unlikely containers. In one picture, a boy holds up a paper bag with a drawing of a bird on its side and a dead chicken hanging from the bag's bottom. Figures hide away in boxes, crouch behind overstuffed sofas and squat with their shirts pulled over their heads. The humans and animals in Ballen's photographs appear isolated, estranged and lost, yet strangely empowered at the same time. The resulting images are allegories of lived experiences as well as surreal takes on human destiny. As Robert A Sobieszek writes in his introduction to Shadow Chamber: 'To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may not be only futile but missing the point.' In 2002, Ballen was named Photographer of the Year by Rencontres d'Arles. His work is included in many important private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Johannesburg Art Museum, South Africa; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
About the Author
Robert A. Sobieszek is Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he served in various curatorial positions and as Director of Photographic Collections at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He has organized over 50 exhibitions and authored 10 books, including LACMA's Robert Smithson: Photo Works and The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. Author's residence: Los Angeles, USA Born in New York City, Roger Ballen has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for almost 30 years. The son of a picture editor at Magnum, he worked as a geologist and mining consultant before starting his own photographic career by documenting the small villages of rural South Africa and their isolated inhabitants. His images are both powerful social statements and disturbing psychological studies. Ballen's previous book Outland (Phaidon, 2001) is of the most extraordinary photographic documents of the late twentieth century. Author's residence: Johannesburg, South Africa
