Roger Ballen was born in New York City, he has lived and worked in Johannesburg for over thirty years. He is using the camera as a means of self-expression, he photographed civil rights activists and Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s. He obtained a Bachelors degree in Psychology at the University of California - Berkeley. His work is included in the Museum of Modern Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Ballen has had exhibitions at the National Library of Australia and University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Technical Considerations:
Roger Ballen's artwork always appears to be black and white, his photographs rendered by the simple process of exposing film to light, map our perception of reality despite the concerns of modern and post-modern theory. Roger Ballen is such an artist. Living and working for many years now outside the central corridors of the art world, he has methodically developed a striking body of work in stripped down, film-based, black-and-white photography. Ballen seems to have taken leaps forward, bringing the visual language he continues to refine to a peak level of clarity and originality. His photographs are instantly absorbing, then just as quickly mystifying, and perhaps ultimately, impenetrable.
In his work medium, he usually picks a space and draws something on the wall as the background, his drawing always seems to be very unique and matches with the theme of his subject matter in his photographs. Drawings have appeared on the walls of Ballen's photographs for many years.
The random and frenetic lines that appeared on walls and surfaces in his previous work now come together as figures, faces, and scenes. Shown in black and white, they emulate charcoal and in their forceful directness.
Formal Considerations:
Roger Ballen has his own and very unique style of artwork, the subject matter and pre-planned locations are always well prepared, his works have a strong conceptual power, they deliver thousand words. Roger Ballen's work has many compositions/form, he gather's materials and subject matters and well planned to combine them together into his photographs, and appear to be his own and very unique style of artwork.
The tableau of Ballen's unsettling visual fantasy world condenses decades of thoughtful photographic exploration. the subject matter forming and the template is his signature work. The characters Ballen presented were very odd. Ballen produces an evolving body of increasingly complex images was the extent to which Ballen's vision was as unique as any of the subjects he portrayed.
Ballen's compositions are full of life, and communicate a celebratory, playful feeling despite the suggestion of dark undercurrents. With this series, the sense of disjointedness that has been a part of Ballen's work for over a decade comes into full focus, delivering a sort of tarot card mash up with unlimited interpretive possibility.
His photographs portray an otherness that highlights the expectations and assumptions that we, as viewers, bring to them in our effort to identify and categorise as a way of understanding.
And his artworks are formally traditional, raw, and gritty, these qualities are pushed to an extreme with such confusing visual technique that the photographs can almost seem synthetic and unreal despite their textural familiarity. They perplex the eye; they bewilder the mind. They elicit a nonlinear, nonverbal experience from the viewer and offer up scarce evidence of whom, why, or when. Something in them begs to be explained, broken down, contextualised, which can't be done. Ballen successfully lures the viewer into questioning the meaning of imagery that is fundamentally beyond the scope of logic.
Ballen maintains tight formal control of every visual element within the frame, he allows meaning to unfold in the realm of free association, so that details within and amongst his images inform each other in the creation of their own peculiar language.
The Choice of Subject Matter
Roger Ballen's materials in his artwork are very unique, different and special. His subjects and objects mostly appear to be "dirty" "messy" "unique" "old" "strange" "odd" "weird" and of course those elements that he uses attracts the viewers eyes, and let viewers ask questions and answers questions throughout his artwork. It is his own style of subject matter as well. The very unique styled subject matter.
His human subjects appear as an isolated foot, hand, or inexplicable combinations of limbs, shadows, and draped forms that reveal little about themselves. Ballen's feel for character brings the empathetic voyeurism of Diane Arbus to a fragmented staging reminiscent of Joel-Peter Witkin. However, it is significant that, unlike Witkin, Ballen depicts pieces of human beings that are clearly still attached to their living hosts.
Witkin's artwork
The Success in How Well the Photograph Communicate an Idea
"Photography is like going into the mineshaft", says Roger Ballen, and well he should know. As a geologist, his fieldwork sometimes has taken him 2 kilometers under the earth's surface, in search of diamonds, gold, and other minerals.
Roger Ballen's art work are usually very "dark" featured, and hard to understand, Ballen's artworks allow one to slip into an uncomfortable, yet familiar delirium, completely intrigued (or horrified in some cases). Ballen explains that his audience is merely confronting the shadow side of their own psyche. This response brings to mind other artists accused of such 'dark' works, those who through their unsettling creations, have caused audiences to wrench open their minds and be willingly pulled along in the undertow. Chaos is heightened through his use of incredibly complex backgrounds. His black and white palette again compounds the pandemonium and with his flash he drenches the scene in brashness, resulting in the compression of foreground and background almost into one flat plane.
Ballen is first and foremost a formalist; his photographs have their foundations firmly planted in emotive compositions.
In "Asylum", scenes are filled to bursting with multiple layers of figures, animals and sculptures existing against crowded backgrounds of primitive drawings, which have become his hallmark. They are obsessively messier than works from his past collections, such as "Outland" (2001) and "Shadow Chamber" (2005), which are stark, accentuated by wire lines, drawing the viewer's gaze around the composition. Often, the key in Ballen's work tends to settle to the bottom, weighting the picture in a strong foundation of ambiguity, but in all his work the square format contains the image, much like a cage containing an uncontrollable force.
In "Boarding House" (2009), full figures are replaced by mere body parts: mouths, arms, feet and hands, fingers pop out of the backdrops, causing the photographs to become more aesthetic and ambiguous. In "Asylum", the only human figure that appears is completely masked and almost disappears into the background. Any other human figures are mere effigies: mannequins, often cracked, disfigured and decaying. Present throughout "Asylum" is the character of a white bird, providing some visual sense of hope or relief within this mad house of disjointed limbs, headless figures and animals, both alive and skeletal. The contrast of the white bird acts as a full stop amidst the rattling chaos within the shades of gray.
Asylum Series of Roger Ballen's work
Boarding House Series by Roger Ballen
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