The Photography of Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen’s photography produces a moral imperative: it unsettles and repels. Its aesthetic balances between emptiness and a densely packed reality that directly confronts the viewer with uncanny, repellent elements and with something stranger still: depictions of interiors unlike any you have ever seen, filled with streaks of dirt and charcoal graffiti, oddly punctuated by scurrying mice, birds, snakes and creature-like human beings caught in an incomprehensible, surreal existence.

Over the years, Ballen’s photographs became increasingly unreal and painterly. They gradually moved away from documenting life in remote, rural South Africa until they seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of Freud’s Rat Man.

The photograph forms a passage between a world of light and one of darkness, a flattened image from which perspective has effectively been removed and in which everything—living, dead or indeterminately somewhere in between—has been transformed into a black comedy of surface and texture, into an improbably mutable and varied palette of greys.

In the early 1980s, Ballen exchanged his 35 mm Nikon for a medium-format Rolleiflex¹. He explained the change by noting that, unlike the 35 mm camera, which produces a rectangular image and thus requires the photographer to indicate in every shot that one dimension is more important than the other, the square format of the Rollei encourages a neutral aesthetic, bringing out the forms within the image and their contrasting textures. The effect of this change was immediately visible in the photographs made after Ballen moved to South Africa, many of which are presented in this exhibition. Since then, Ballen—one of the last generation of photographers to work with black-and-white film—has gradually moved away from the stark, high-contrast images prized by many photographers, Bill Brandt among them, towards a different version of black and white. He sought a texture containing tonal transitions between black and white: the visual language of newsprint, the streaks of printer’s ink, the dingy ash-grey-and-white hue of a texture that visually resonates with the historical memory of apartheid, a grey world in which colour mattered above all else, yet which reduced the people living within it to black and white.

The best way to trace the shifting dimensions of his distinctive mode of expression is to consider them in relation to the various published series of his photographs: the intervals separating them record the transformation of Ballen’s aesthetic.

At first glance, the earliest photographs in the Boyhood series (1979) appear to offer a fairly typical depiction of the essence of boyhood across different cultures. At the same time, however, the photographs also contain two elements that would find fuller expression in Ballen’s work: a sinister note of Surrealism, or uncanniness, that disrupts the portraits’ solemn tenderness, and a compositional structure that persistently recurs in every photograph. Here, despite the youthful energy and outward gaiety, one is nevertheless aware that, in the photograph U.S.A. (1979), for example, the frog in the half-naked boy’s hand is being squeezed too tightly, while the naked boys in Indonesia (1979) are playing at lying dead on the beach: a torso covered in sand, the head outside the frame, while at the top of the picture a small, unidentified, reptile-like hand gropes its way into the camera’s field of view. It is also worth considering the arrangement of linear forms in U.S.A.: the boy’s smooth arms and legs form a formal counterpoint to the rough wood of the bench and the horizontal boards of the jetty that cut across the picture, contrasts emphasised by the boy’s smoothly combed dark fringe, which draws the eye. Similarly, in Timor (1979), the vertical rectangle of the photograph distributes emphasis equally between the boy’s face and the boards behind him, where graffiti consisting of letters clumsily written in chalk by a young pupil and the rough, weathered textures gradually absorb the viewer’s attention. Rough surfaces covered in graffiti and illegible scrawls would forever remain a hallmark of Ballen’s vision.

The first of the South African series, Dorps (1986), is constructed around a tension between the documentary element, through which Ballen patiently records and evokes South Africa’s forgotten small farming towns, and his own vision and attention to the formal, aesthetic beauty of what he sees. In these pictures, the people who inhabit the towns are almost physically absent from the streets and buildings. Instead, we encounter the formal lines of doors, walls, windows and verandas, or dirty, ornate metal chairs whose seats have split apart and gape like mouths beneath a decaying, untidy corrugated-iron wall and a boarded-up window in Chairs, Asian Bazaar (1984). People seem very scarce. When they do appear, they are alone, in portraits mostly taken close up against a neutral background of rough white walls. An exception is the old man in Old Man, Ottoshoop (1983), who appears to have been absorbed into the textures of his hat, coat and the wall behind him, despite the accented whiteness of his beard. At the same time, another visual feature emerges that would become increasingly dominant in Ballen’s photographs: images of the walls inside small-town homes, their greying whiteness hung with photographs, religious pictures or erotic images and unconsciously decorated with dangling electrical cables. One photograph in particular indicates the direction Ballen’s photography would take: Pensioner, Volksrust (1984). This is no longer a central composition with an empty wall in the background: the old man stands to one side, staring dully and hopelessly somewhere beyond the lens. Behind his sharp black shadow, we see a small table covered with an ordinary patterned cloth, on which lie his spectacles, watch and lighter; pasted to the walls or tucked behind a wire that runs down to a ceramic light switch are four erotic photographs of smiling blonde women with their heads tilted to one side. Just above his head hangs another image: an old, hand-framed photograph with a passe-partout, showing the pensioner as a young man in military uniform with his mother sitting behind him, smiling, her head tilted to one side.

Ballen’s photographs oscillate between formal, aestheticised representations, such as those of faded wooden doors or the interior walls of houses in South Africa’s small farming towns, and a documentary record of the faces of the various figures who inhabit these buildings and empty streets. These images are more intense and static, despite the evident early inspiration of Diane Arbus, and their layers of irony and distance are permeated by the cultural atmosphere of apartheid.

Ballen’s photographs and videos depict people or places considered marginal, although viewers’ attitudes towards them vary considerably. In some cases, viewers reproduce existing attitudes of segregation, domination and exclusion. At other times, they seek to rehabilitate people from the social margins in order to restore their dignity.

Sometimes the representation itself seems to oscillate ambiguously or uncertainly between the two positions, or may be interpreted differently in different contexts by different viewers. During the apartheid years, politically engaged photographers such as David Goldblatt photographed the hidden lives of South Africa’s exploited and disenfranchised African population. Ballen, a documentarian of a different kind, revealed the world of apartheid far from the cities, where Afrikaners on their farms lived isolated lives outside time, and depicted a culture as strange as the lost colony of Germans who supported Arianism, discovered by Ben Macintyre in 1990 in the town of Nueva Germania in Paraguay, and who, more than a century later, continued to marry only among themselves.

Platteland (1996) contains more photographs of Afrikaners living in small towns known as dorps. Ballen’s unsettling portraits immortalise the gazes of people from the social margins, standing to attention and posing with evident pleasure on their faces—as in Wife of Abattoir Worker Holding 3 Puppies, OFS (1994)—or staring provocatively at the viewer without any apparent awareness that, to metropolitan eyes, they might look like beings from another world. This is undoubtedly evident in Ballen’s best-known photograph, Dresie and Casie, Twins, Western Transvaal (1993). Although Ballen’s ambivalent portraits place the viewer too close for comfort and appear at first glance to show no sympathy for their subjects, his critics have too readily assumed that he presents unwitting deviants, like Charcot displaying his hysterical patients from the Salpêtrière during his lectures. Yet criticism cuts both ways: Ballen allows the people he photographs to speak for themselves, without judgement. Why assume that he judges or exposes them? Who has the right to say that these people are abnormal, that they should be judged as such, or that for some reason they should be overlooked by the camera’s eye because they do not conform to accepted norms?

Ballen shows us portraits of people whose humanity challenges us, people who are generally kept out of sight and who have rejected the possibility of becoming ordinary photographic subjects. He leaves the viewer free to respond and interpret. The eye of the lens gazes mercilessly at the subjects in a completely frontal arrangement, as people from the Transvaal pose against the interior walls of their homes, decorated with pictures, bent wire coat hangers and electrical cables running down plaster covered with children’s drawings.

Like Weegee’s subjects, they are caught by the flash in a sudden moment, their shadows surrounding them like a menacing aura lurking behind. Yet instead of reducing the image to two tones, the harshness of the flash seems to produce an infinite shading of a world in which nothing is simply black or white.

One photograph from this series not only recalls the man in the image entitled Pensioner, Volksrust (1984), but also looks ahead: Diamond Digger and Son Standing on Bed, Western Transvaal (1987). Here, a woman who works in diamond mining and her son are filled with extraordinary enthusiasm, perhaps because they are hanging new pictures on the bedroom wall. For the first time, they have become participants, actors within the photograph. From this point onwards, Ballen’s photographs of walls would be filled with further images that correspond with and belong to them, as in Boy with Guns, Western Transvaal (1993), where a boy stands on a dresser, with a river landscape and a landscape with a giraffe behind him, while the walls on which the pictures hang are chaotically decorated with smudged drawings.

The photograph entitled Boetie Nel, Grape Farmer, Northern Cape (1990) was perhaps the last of Ballen’s photographs to be taken outdoors, outside an interior. It is as if Ballen subsequently moved for good into the interiors of abandoned houses, such as the one in Man Shaving on Verandah, Western Transvaal (1986), where a man crouches in front of a door amid piles of wood, paraffin tins and plastic crates, with nothing behind him but darkness.

In the Outland series (2001), whose title simply denotes a foreign, remote part of the country, Ballen ventures into an unknown and paradoxically interior territory, where he would remain. These are no longer portraits but photographs in which people become performers in a silent theatre—stranger, starker and more indeterminate than the figures of Beckett or Pinter. At first glance, Portrait of Sleeping Girl (2000) appears to be the series’ only conventional image. It transpires, however, that the girl is watched over not only by the crouching cat sitting on her, but also by a bearded Afrikaner ancestor and his wife in a dark photograph hanging above her on a wall covered with graffiti and children’s drawings.

Elsewhere, as in Tommy, Samson and a Mask (2000), we begin to recognise a characteristically Ballenesque scene in which naked people lie lifeless: a young African boy impassively holds a Cupid mask—here half pig, half human—above a skeletal man. These photographs no longer show South Africa; in a sense, they no longer even portray South African people, but people caught in a strange dream world in which their primal selves are revealed through their relationships with others and with animals—intimate, as in Brian with Pet Pig (1998); aggressive, as in Cat Catcher (1998); or emotionally neutral and inscrutable, as in Puppy Between Feet (1999).

Puppy Between Feet was the first photograph Ballen made after purchasing a 90 mm macro lens, which allowed him to move in considerably closer and to incorporate texture—the rough, calloused skin of dirty feet, coarse fabric and the puppy’s smooth fur—as the dominant element of the visual experience. Here, the lens makes it possible to present a two-dimensional surface in shades of grey: the skin of cracked and dirty feet, the puppy’s muzzle, the fingers holding it, the surface of the mattress and the sack serving as a blanket.

Although tiny, the puppy is a symptom of the way animals begin to take over these photographs. They had, of course, appeared in earlier pictures, but now they constitute an equally important form of life, making it more difficult to distinguish between animals and humans. They appear together in a drama from which we, as viewers, are excluded, as in Sickroom (2000). The laconic title gives us no clue as to what this performance might be or mean, or what strange ritual we might be witnessing, just as in Living Room Scene (1999), where a man with an antenna and a woman clutching a doll have become actors in an unnamed fantasy being performed before us.

After Outland (2001), Ballen returned to a greater distance and indeterminate interiors in the Shadow Chamber (2005) and Boarding House (2009) series. Within these interiors, although they might be human spaces, he moved his subjects to the margins of the images. People become figures, part of a panoply of strange objects and fibrous surfaces—props that create a sinister, surreal theatre. With Shadow Chamber, the photographs become images of artworks and their remnants: frames and half-constructed creations in which Ballen combined strange scraps of material, small figurines found at flea markets, tangled wires suspended on the wall, and graffiti made by him or by his actors.

Ballen is an artist who portrays not himself—as is typical of the postmodern stance—but his own works of art, secret installations that will never be exhibited. Sometimes, if one looks closely, it is possible to see a small bird figurine or a mouse darting past, transforming the artwork into a moment captured in a photograph. But this photography is so remote, its reality so creatively fabricated and so far removed from Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, that Ballen seems to have eliminated the very element intrinsic to photography: time. These are photographs in which the depth of time and history has been transformed into superficiality, images of stony faces as expressionless as the empty wall against which so many of his models pose.

People are emaciated, while the walls that bear traces of human life in the Dorps series, hung with random objects and erotic photographs, become the primary subject of the photographs. Against this background, the children’s crude graffiti, dangling electrical cables, wire coat hangers, strangely alien religious pictures and other images hanging on the bare plaster become the subjects of the photographs.

Just as Ballen had previously separated the physiognomy of rural settlements—Dorps simply means a small town—from their inhabitants—Platteland means country—he now separates the outward appearance of houses from the figures who created this strangely beautiful, deserted environment.

In the oppressively gloomy interiors of Ballen’s photographs, people become elements of the world to the same extent as unwanted objects: a world in which the boundaries between human beings and animals are blurred, and in which the human merges into the topography of the existence of the natural at the margins of the human world, in decaying rooms decorated with bizarre, cave-like drawings of unknown provenance, by anonymous and enigmatic authors.

In the Shadow Chamber series, people almost disappear—literally, in the case of Head Inside Shirt (2001)—or their scale changes and they become negligible in comparison with spectral objects, such as the wire in Twirling Wires (2001)—try looking at this photograph from a distance—or the boy in Skew Mask (2002). Unlike William Forsythe’s ballets, in which the dancers, although grotesquely contorted in their movements, remain the focus of attention, here people become fragmented objects inhabiting a space of wandering parts, no more significant than the rabbits and cats roaming there. The photographs are filled with strange wire objects that look like refuse from the studio in which Alexander Calder made his mobiles, created with the randomness of Joan Miró’s art.

Yet the Spanish artist’s pictures, although unsettling, are full of warmth and colour, whereas Ballen offers greyness, shadows, streaks and stained walls covered with frightening faces from children’s cartoons—the only traces of their spectral inhabitants. Gradually, living bodies have disappeared altogether, and all that remain are dolls, stuffed animals, skulls, masks or scenes bordering on torture, as in Hanging Pig (2001) or One Arm Goose (2004). What Ballen offers us is the reality of his own creations: new, literal representations of still lifes, images of inanimate objects that remain photographs rather than merely photographic records of installations he has created.

Ballen has moved as far as possible from the traditional role of photography: from a documentary record or a capture of what is real, although these images sometimes seem strangely closest to the unfailingly sharp depictions of still lifes in early daguerreotypes. The reality we see is no longer real at all, but is instead the artist’s reality, which he projects onto the camera, as in Funeral Rites (2004). What is the role of the camera and of photography here, and for whom is this record of imagined torture chambers being made?

With the Boarding House series (2009), perspectives and representations become even more two-dimensional and more pictorial, while at the same time acquiring greater brutality. Pain and agony—Confinement (2003), Cut Loose (2005), Fragments (2005), Sliced (2007)—are more visible, and some photographs, such as Cornered (2004) and Retreat (2005), evoke the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib (2004), particularly the horizontally reclining figure on a leash in the image known as Abu Ghraib Leash, and the tubes and wires tied to the arms in the famous photograph of a hooded prisoner standing on a box. Heads, hands and arms detached from bodies, as in Predators (2007), evoke other scenes of cruelty and extermination. This is a private interior depicting the necropolitics of an external world that is too present and too real.

This dark reality could not be sustained at such an intensity. In the latest series, Asylum (2014), the torture chamber has become something like a medieval dungeon filled with cages. The representations are more detached here, steeped in melancholy, and the composition is more precisely constructed; the pictures are filled with painted screens, friezes and wallpaper, as well as a note of tranquillity, metaphorically expressed by Matisse’s doves, caught by the lens as they land or take flight, while dark, primal scenes are presented as elements of a stage set. This photographic theatre now presents a dance of birds.

Unlike the open spaces in the Dorps series, where the emptiness of white is held in stark contrast to the depth of black, here every inch of the surface is filled and densely textured; there is no space devoid of action. At the same time, the human being as an element of the image has been reduced to body parts, to hands or heads, or is real, seen from below with an open mouth, from a perspective so often used by Pontormo, or wears the mask of a broken doll. These are people playing a role within an aesthetic, not individuals with their own histories and identities. Yet, as real people are reduced to metonymic parts, Asylum is haunted by the human figure, now inscribed within the dark theatrical decorations of broken dolls, abandoned statues, prosthetic hands and recurring spectral drawings of ghostly faces.

These evocative faces conjure up marginalised others, now absent from the stage, while around them live—too close for comfort—birds, mice, snakes and fish, whose vitality draws the viewer into a brutal encounter with otherness. Above all, however, birds continue to appear in these photographs: doves flying beyond the frame, beyond the imaginable boundaries of enclosed, claustrophobic spaces.

Everything in these photographs is reduced to the single word that forms the title of the series: asylum. An inviolable, safe place of shelter, an escape to another nation, and once a sanctuary… yet also an institution providing a place for the wronged, the unfortunate, the poor and the mentally ill. Here, in these images, asylum becomes a theatre of death, madness, insanity and confinement; a lost connection between dead fragments of the body and remains—eyes, bones, random scraps from a brutal world—but also a world inhabited by birds associated with redemption, which hunt, approach and at the same time startle and take fright, rising on their wings beyond the frame. Amid the dirt and darkness of a nightmarish asylum, the white doves are transformed into figures of aspiration and inspiration, heralding the possibility of another way of being, elsewhere, somewhere beyond this space, beyond this world, beyond us, beyond the Anthropocene.

*Robert J.C. Young, Fellow of the British Academy and Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. His writing addresses a range of issues related to colonial history and postcolonial theory, as well as cultural and political history, literature, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis and translation studies. He is currently working on an edition of Frantz Fanon’s previously uncollected and unpublished works and writing a book on the philosophy and theory of cultural translation. He is the editor of the bimonthly journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and the author, among others, of the following books: White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990); Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995); Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001); Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003); and The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008). His writing has been translated into more than twenty languages.

¹ All biographical information is drawn from the author’s interview with Roger Ballen, conducted in London on 26 September 2011.

An earlier version of the above essay was published under the title ‘The Photography of Roger Ballen’ in the guide to Roger Ballen’s exhibition Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983–2011 at Manchester City Art Gallery in 2012.