Roger Ballen, a self-tought photographer from New York, has been a major force in the art world in the past ten years. His earlier works, Platteland (1994) and Outlands (2001), were considered phenomena, even controversial because of their treatment of poor white South Afrcans who posed in often macabre scenarios sometimes also with poor black South Africans. The racial and sexual tensions were considered shocking and politically insensitive. Ballen’s new work, presented in the book Shadow Chamber (2005) and accompanying travelling exhibition, marks a major shift in Ballen’s oeuvre.
Shadow Chamber makes the most of Ballen’s theatre of the mind but strips away the overt politics almost completely. It is also far more of a consciously art-oriented book as befits someone who has won major international prizes in European photography festivals and is represented by top-noch art galleries.
Ballen, who studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated with a doctorate in mineral economics from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981, is an autodictat, but not without an indirect photography background. His mother, Adrienne Ballen, worked at the New York office of Magnum Photos, and Alfried Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were guests in the family home. His work as a geologist led him to South Africa where he explored the country and travelled through the small towns and villages and met the people he initially photographed for a book entitled Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa (1986). In his later work, Ballen staged the people he met in tiny, cramped rooms, mostly bare of furnishings, but with fantastic, simple props of wire and boxes and his subjects pets, dogs, cats, mice, ducks, and the like. His individual portraits, like Dressie and Casie, twins, Western Transvaal, 1993 or Sergeant F de Bruin, Dept of Prisons Employee, Orange Free State (1992), come across as grotesque types straight out of works by Dianne Arbus or Shelby Lee Adams. His work was filled with political and sexual tension as well as an implied menace of physical violence where people with huge battered hands held newborn puppies or chickens or posed with one another in politically complicated roles of master and servant as in Man and Maid (1991). This was, of course, during the transition
out of Apaartheid to majority black rule in South Africa and greeted with consternation as much for its content as well as for the powerful strangeness of Ballen’s vision. Some of this work is contained in the travelling exhibition and sets the context for his newer, post 2002 project.
As curators Robert Fleck of Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and Robert Sobieszek of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have pointed out, the intense psycho dramas in Ballen’s stagings have a lot to do with the existential dramas of Samuel Beckett and the paintings of Lucian Freud whose tormented figured seem to describe the angst-ridden modern condition of total hopelessness and despair. Ballen’s new images continue to explore this dark horror. In the cover image of Shadow Chamber a man wrapped in a rough blanket stares fearfully up at an immense, inexplicable ball of wire hung above is head. Other images pose animals and people in incongruous, alarming scenarios. The walls of all but empty rooms are painted with cryptic signs or words and strange toys or farm implements or yet more wire lay strewn about in careful constellations of deepest absurdity. It is very arty, yet the menaces seem to play on our deepest fears of the unknown.
In a 2005 interview Ballen noted that “In a way it is about a strange, ambiguous, dark, and comic place. It is a space that we might recognize; yet we are not quite clear where it is. It is not necessarily a place that you would want to visit or spend a Sunday afternoon. It has elements that are both disturbing and humorous.“ Ballen’s vision is deeply personal, and he feels that the “images reflect [his] psyche“. Like Joel-Peter Witkin, Ballen has a unique style that is immediately recognizable His seemingly crazy subjects standing in these rooms, poking out of boxes or posed against maniacal drawings remind the viewer of David “Chim“ Seymour’s famous image of a little girl, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, scrawling on a chalk board and staring at the photographer with the wild eyes of someone who has experienced too much absolute horror.
Ballen’s art, and it is indeed art for the politics have been drained away, is to play on this quality of unconscious symbolism or universal fear of the unknown. Whether Beckett characters ever get out of their traps is never explained, similarly Ballen’s subjects seem eternally stuck in their own, and by extension our own, nightmares. There is a very dark darkness at play in Shadow Chamber, but it is just a game.
Bill Kouwenhoven
Arles, July 2007
Haus der Photographie / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany
25 May – 26 August 2007
www.deichtorhallen.de
Roger Ballen: Shadow Chamber, ed. Robert A Sobieszek
Softcover, 128 Pages, 71 images
London: Phaidon Verlag, 2005 £24.95/39,95 ? www.phaidon.com
Published May 2007
ISBN 0 7148 4466 7
Author: 
