Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen is an American artist living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and working in its surrounds since the 1970s. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field 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 Ballen's artworks. Ballen describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him 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.
Biography
Ballen was born in New York City to Irving Ballen and Adrienne Ballen, and was raised as Jewish. His father was an attorney and the founding partner of McLaughlin, Stern. His mother was a member of the photo agency Magnum from 1963 to 1967 prior to opening the Photography House Gallery with Inge Bondi in New York City in 1968. Ballen became acquainted with the photographs of Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson either from published photographs in albums or through personal acquaintance. He attended Scarborough School, New York, and went to Camp Stinson during his childhood summers. At age 13, he received his first camera, and was soon after employed for a first commercial job of photographing McDonald's, Mamaroneck, New York. Ballen was interested in the realism of Rembrandt from a young age, and was drawn to photographing elderly men. He recalls that one of the most "vivid and pivotal moment in his life occurred in 1968 when parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera for high school graduation. On the very same day went to the outskirts of Sing Sing Prison near New York city to take photographs".He later studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, which was an epicenter for the 1960s counter-culture. Here, he was exposed to R. D. Laing's anti-psychiatry movement, Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious", the Theatre of the Absurd and existential philosophers, such as Sartre and Heidegger, all of which came to be formative in the development of his artistic style. During the summer of 1969, he photographed Woodstock, a series which was published in the New York Times 50th anniversary of the iconic music festival. Ballen notes that capturing Woodstock "played a role in getting to know the human experience, human endeavour, finding the moment, working with people, searching in difficult circumstances for something that stood out. If I had to say what are important aspects that run through the work, it's trying to come to terms with pure chaos." Ballen made his first film Ill Wind after completing a course in film making in 1972.
After the death of his mother Adrienne in 1973, he, like many of the counter-culture, developed existential longing in responsive aversion to the materialism of Western society and his suburban upbringing. He spent the subsequent five months at the Art Students of League of New York. Here, he painted art brut, primitivist, paintings, that according to his teacher, "belonged in the Stone Age". In the autumn of 1973, yearning to find Conrad's "heart of darkness" and Eastern nirvana, he left on a five-year journey, that would take him by land from Cairo to Cape Town, and then Istanbul to New Guinea. On this trip, he continued an ongoing interest in taking pictures of enigmatic men against dramatic surfaces of shrines, temples and markets. He also began a series of 'field photographs' of streets, earthen paths or walls and developed an interest in observing the life of young boys. He kept Kodak Tri-X or Plus X film in a green canvas knapsack which he would tie to his legs during meals or overnight train rides, or tied to hotel bedposts. He processed the film and would send it to his father in New York.
On this trip, he arrived in South Africa, where he met his future wife, an artist, paper-maker and art teacher, Lynda Moross, whom he married in 1980, and had twins with in 1989. These travels also spurred on his first photographic book entitled Boyhood, which was a series of universal, iconic images of boys that Ballen had encountered while seeking to recreate his childhood in the adventure of travel. Disillusioned by the idea of commercial photography, Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he received in 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 whites who were once privileged during Apartheid, but who were now isolated and economically deprived. During this time, he worked closely with his master printer and friend, Dennis da Silva. After 1994, he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter, finding it closer to home in Johannesburg, where he continues to work. Since 2007, he has worked closely with his art director, Marguerite Rossouw.
In 2018, Ballen 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 in photography in Africa. From April 2020, it will be housed in the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Art, Forest Town, Johannesburg.
Ballenesque aesthetic
Ballen's early street photography and the psychological portraiture of Boyhood, Dorps and Platteland was influenced by the work of Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and Elliot Erwitt. The distinctive "Ballenesque" style of his documentary fiction, has been said to reference the artistic genres of absurdist theatre, outsider art, art brut, naivism, photographic surrealism and the photographic grotesque. He has also said to have been influenced by a wide range of other literary artistic/philosophical work, such as that of Beckett, Kafka, Jung and Artaud.Robert Young coins the term "Ballenesque" to refer to the unique qualities of Ballen's work that mark and identify it as his own. Young identifies four elements, that, in their "various shifting combinations and relations, together make up the constituent factors of the -esque factor." These include:
Prehensile portraits of the underprivileged
Although present as Ballen's work has evolved, the presence of the marginalized subject is a feature of much of the artist's earlier work. Ballen has emphasized his works do not have a sociopolitical agenda; they rather make a psychological and aesthetic statement. He has also stressed that these subjects are not anonymous; he has developed close friendships with them over the course of the history of working with them:"For many of the people I have worked with over the years, the bond we established while working together, gave them a sense of purpose and meaning. On a typical day, I might receive twenty or thirty phone messages, some asking me when I am going to visit next, some making requests for food or medicine, and others reminding me that it is someone's birthday. In a single day, I can be a doctor, a lawyer, a priest and a social worker."For Young, however, the distinctiveness of these photographs does not lie in the mere documenting of these "others", but rather, by the fact that these subjects are captured in such a way that they feel they "look back" at the spectator. Ballen's square format, shallow depth of field and space, confronts the viewer with a closeness to, and simultaneous inaccessibility of these people, who often seem to have "psychic disturbance". This remoteness is cultivated by the way in which they do not leave their often bizarre, domestic or theatrical, mysterious settings. For Young, that we cannot engage in empathy, sympathy or self-discovery; we merely submit to looking at their "transfixing gaze".
Windowless walls
This "remoteness" of the places of these inaccessible subjects is evoked because the spaces in which they appear are otherworldly—they exist in the realm of the photograph but do not seem to reference actual locations in everyday reality. Young writes: "there is no world that we can reference here." Ballen's use of black-and-white photography up until 2018, contributes powerfully to this transformation. He writes: "Black-and-white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black-and-white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality."Young further notes that the claustrophobic two-dimensional planes of the photograph itself are inscribed with drawings, marks and lines. From the early 90s onward, they appear in Ballen's photographs in wire. These mysterious closed rooms have been referred to by Ballen as "visual embodiments" of the 'place' of the subconscious mind, and as set in which people and animals present themselves and interact with objects and drawings; moments preserved by the stillness of the photograph.
He also emphasizes that these worlds are an artistic reality, in which there is a conversation and interaction of visual elements to create formal harmony. Ballen seems concise form and complex meaning in his images. He writes: "It's not so much a matter of content; it's also a matter of form. I am first and foremost a formalist. I always say that the form comes before the meaning. Before I think about the picture; before I think about pushing the button, I have to feel that the thing is an organic whole, that the forms integrate in some crucial way."