Roger Ballen is a cult American and South African photographer. His work has a special aesthetic, for some people it is attractive and bewitching, for others it is frightening and disgusting. The photographic archive of Roger Ballen contains a lot of unusual and exciting images, from strange portraits of outsiders and outcasts to completely phantasmagoric paintings. It’s difficult to remain indifferent to his art, it evokes complex emotions in the viewer and makes you think about difficult things.
Biography
Roger Ballen was born in 1950 in New York. His mother had a photographic gallery, and from childhood he grew up surrounded by photographs and the people who create them. As a child, he began to take pictures, and at the end of school his parents gave him a professional camera, but for most of his life it was just a hobby for him.
At the age of 23 after graduation, Ballen went to travel the world and in the mid-seventies first came to South Africa, where he met his future wife. In 1977, he returned to the United States and in 1979 published his first book there - Boyhood (“Boyhood”), which contains photographs of boys from different countries. As Ballen himself says, this book is about his own childhood.
In 1981, he received his doctorate in geology and returned to South Africa, where he worked as a geologist for thirty years - his professional activity was in the search for minerals, gold and platinum. Thanks to this activity, Ballen traveled extensively in Africa and was able to see her life from the inside - not from the point of view of a tourist, but as her full participant. This is not a cursory glance from the car window and not a simple documentary: Ballen makes contact with people of interest, communicates with them, goes into their homes and sees what "civilized people" rarely see.
Roger Ballen's second album, released in 1986, titled Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa (“Villages: Small Cities in South Africa”) includes photographs taken by him during geological expeditions. These are landscapes, everyday life, faces of people that he saw on the way. In many ways, this is documentary showing the conditions in which the poor live, so far not affected by progress. However, in all this there is something characteristic of “Ballen” - irrational and frightening.
Dreezy and Casie
One of the most famous photographs of Roger Ballen is “Dreezy and Casie”. She appeared in his third Platteland album ("Countryside"), released in 1994. It depicts drooling twins looking seriously at us.
Ballen refuses to tell any details about them - he is probably somewhat annoyed by the fact that, despite the huge number of shots he made, the focus is still on one single photograph. Since 2011, Dreezy and Kesy have been living in a nursing home: you can compare how they were seen by artist Roger Ballen, and how they look in their usual lives twenty years later.
Documentary Fiction
A feature of Roger Ballen's photographs is that the underlying subjective documentary filming is superimposed on the subjective look of the artist, bringing a special sensation and mood. Ballen himself calls his style documentary fiction. He often says that he is not engaged in social photography, but existential. His work is devoted to the absurdity of life and speaks more about the human destiny than about everyday reality or social problems.
Over time, Ballen’s work undergoes a transformation: starting with his fourth album, Outland (“Distant Land”), elements of the production appear in his photographs, and later on he comes to even more surrealistic images. He also uses drawings, collages, sculptural elements in his works.
Collaboration with Die Antwoord
Probably the work of Roger Ballen became known to the general public through collaboration with the South African group Die Antwoord. In 2006, Yo-Lundy Fisser wrote to Ballen, that his work had a great influence on them, and invited him to create something together.
In 2009, Ballen participated in the creation of the scenery for their first video, Enter the Ninja; in 2011, he directed the clip I Fink U Freeky; in 2017, their short film Tommy can't sleep. Also, Yo-Lundy Fisser and Ninja are present in the photographs and in the video of Ballen as models.