Photographer Roger Ballen: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Roger Ballen is an iconic American and South African photographer. His works have a special aesthetic, for some people - attractive and bewitching, for others - frightening and disgusting. The photographic archive of Roger Ballen contains a lot of unusual and disturbing images, from strange portraits of outsiders and outcasts to completely phantasmagoric paintings. It is difficult to remain indifferent to his art, it evokes complex emotions in the viewer and makes you think about difficult things.

Biography

Roger Ballen was born in 1950 in New York. His mother had a photographic gallery and he grew up surrounded by photographs and the people who create them. He started taking photographs as a child, and his parents gave him a professional camera at the end of school, but for most of his life it was just a hobby for him.

At the age of 23, after graduating from university, Ballen went to travel the world and in the mid-seventies he first came to South Africa,where he met his future wife. In 1977, he returned to the United States and in 1979 published his first book there, Boyhood (“Boyhood”), which contains photographs of boys from different countries. As Ballen himself says, this book is dedicated to his own childhood.

In 1981, he received his doctorate in geology and returned to South Africa, where he worked as a geologist for thirty years - his professional activity was the search for minerals, gold and platinum. Thanks to this activity, Ballen traveled extensively in Africa and was able to see its life from the inside - not from the point of view of a tourist, but as a full participant in it. This is not a superficial look from a car window and not a simple documentary: Ballen establishes contact with people of interest to him, communicates with them, enters their homes and sees what "civilized people" rarely see.

Roger Ballen's second album, Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa, released in 1986, included photographs taken during geological expeditions. These are the landscapes he saw on the way, the way of life, the faces of people. In many ways, this is a documentary showing the conditions in which the poor live, not yet affected by progress. However, there is something characteristically "Ballen" in all this - irrational and frightening.

Drizi and Kazi

One of the most famous photographs of Roger Ballen - "Drizi and Kazi". She appeared on his third album Platteland ("Rurallocality”), published in 1994. It features drooling twins staring straight at us seriously.

Ballen refuses to give any details about them - he is probably a little annoyed that, despite the huge number of pictures he took, the main focus still goes to one single photo. It is known that since 2011, Drizzy and Casy have been living in a nursing home: you can compare how the artist Roger Ballen saw them, and how they look in their ordinary lives twenty years later.

Documentary fiction

A feature of Roger Ballen's photographs is that the subjective view of the artist is superimposed on the underlying documentary reportage, bringing a special feeling and mood. Ballen himself calls his style documentary fiction. He often talks about what he does not do social photography, but existential. His work is dedicated to the absurdity of life and speaks more about the human condition than about everyday reality or social problems.

Over time, Ballen's work has undergone a transformation: starting with his fourth album, Outland ("Distant land"), his photographs appear staged elements, and later he comes to even more surreal images. He also uses drawings, collages, sculptural elements in his works.

Cooperation with Die Antwoord

Probably wideRoger Ballen's work became known to the public through his collaboration with the South African band Die Antwoord. In 2006, Yo-Landi Fisser wrote to Ballen stating that his work was a big influence on them and suggested that he create something together.

In 2009, Ballen participated in the creation of the scenery for their first video Enter the Ninja, in 2011 the video directed by him I Fink U Freeky appears, in 2017 - their joint short film Tommy can't sleep. Also, Yo-Landi Fisser and Ninja are featured in Ballen's photos and videos as models.