Review
Roger Ballen at
by Hind Berji
Visceral is a word used almost too often in
discussions about art—especially since it is
meant to describe sensations devoid of visual/
sensory input—but when an image hits you
in your gut in the most innate, ornate, and
grotesque ways imaginable, it seems like an
understatement.
In New York-born photographer Roger Ballen’s work, there is a subliminal understanding that transcends consciousness and perceived reality—essentially; the right hook
to your gut that took you by surprise during
a pleasant gallery visit. At Snap! Space, the
gallery organized a retrospective collection of
Ballen’s dark, sometimes theatrical renditions
of the conscious and subconscious mind in a
fluid trajectory of his career.
The collection includes earlier pieces from his series
Outland to his most wellknown photographs taken
of South Africa’s politically
privileged white minority in
Platteland. Ballen has lived
and worked in South Africa
since the 1980s, where he
initially worked as a geologist. The move prompted
him to continue his photographic hobby as a full-time
career and his portraits of
Afrikaners in rural South
Africa have been compared
to iconic photographers like
Diane Arbus (his portrait of
two South African twins especially resonated with Arbus fans, and it is one of the
most recognizable images in
contemporary photography).
the gruesome nature of the impoverished, the
rural, and the marginalized; in summary, the
kind of gruesomeness we try to avoid in our
polished lives.
verseness, revealing parts of ourselves we
believe to have safely tucked away, like in
Unwind, a piece in the Asylum of the Birds
series, showing a man lying on a meager bed
frame. His face is covered by a menacing dooWhy do we find these images disturbing, be- dle drawn on fabric. It’s eerily frightening to
guiling, or strangely humorous? Do we turn imagine what lies underneath.
our heads before the hypnosis of Ballen’s
strange world sucks us in? For a photograph This is one of most impressive things about
to be Ballenesque, it must be penetrative. It Ballen’s photographs: each one embodies
has to hold us under a spell. It leads us to the underbelly of human consciousness in a
consider the grotesque, perverse dimensions millisecond of reality exquisitely assembled
of our reality—whatever reality may mean and captured. Ballen’s structures of the subto us. Some may argue that art is a reflection conscious are concrete manifestations of the
of the viewer; that a photograph can act as psyche. The Theatre of Apparition was partly
a mirror. The images may reflect something inspired by drawings and carvings found in an
unsettling, ugly, or deeply revealing about us. abandoned women’s prison, and a suburban
home is the setting for Asylum
of the Birds, leading us to the
temporal in-between captured
in Boarding House. In the
darkest depths of existence
exposed in Shadow Chamber,
a three-story building with
literal chambers of animals,
humans, and objects interact,
incorporating sculptural and
formative motifs more than
any other Ballen series. There
is a textured assortment
of people and animals that
leaves viewers feeling a sense
of abandonment. The subjects
are petrified, frozen not just
by the artist’s immortalization
of them through the photographic form, but also by their
environment.
Dresie and Casie, twins, Western Transvaal (Platteland series)
Arbus comparisons notwithstanding, Ballen identifies more with
playwright Samuel Beckett. The starkness of
Beckett’s plays, the dirty furniture, dismal
characters, and bleak backdrops are logical
comparisons to Ballen’s pieces, as his work
has become gradually more psychological
than social or economic. Actually, they’re all
of these things. They’re a contemplation of
the inner recesses of the mind in relation to
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It was around 2000 when
Ballen began to incorporate
portraiture and drawing into
his photographs. In Eugene
on the Phone, a boy lies in a
classical pose on a stained couch, holding a
frantic cat by its tail while holding a telephone
receiver up to his face. The form of the cat,
the young man, and the crooked stenciled silhouette of a hanger on the wall somehow join
harmoniously.
His work is fascinating because it forces us to
do all the mental work, facing the primitive
machinations of the mind. At first glance, his
work doesn’t seem to be a stripping of the
viewer, but it can disarm us. Like the mirror
in a gritty public restroom, Ballen’s work forces us to look at the sloppy wall art, the stained
furniture, and the grimacing people. Perhaps Looking at the retrospective, it’s easy to pinthe scenes look all too familiar in their per- point Ballen’s other repeating motifs: heads
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