Roger Ballen (born April 11, 1950) is an American artist living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and working in its surrounds since the 1970s. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Marginalized people, animals, found objects, wires and childlike drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Ballen’s artworks. Ballen describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Roger Ballen: Roger the Rat
- 1.2 Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
- 1.3 The World According to Roger Ballen
- 1.4 Roger Ballen: Shadow Chamber (PHOTOGRAPHY)
- 1.5 Ballenesque (Collector's Edition): Roger Ballen: A Retrospective /anglais
- 1.6 Asylum of the Birds
- 1.7 Outland
- 1.8 Roger Ballen
- 1.9 Ivor Powell: Roger Ballen : Die Antwoord: I Fink You Freeky (Hardcover); 2013 Edition
- 1.10 Roger ballen (Photo poche) (French Edition)
Biography
Ballen was born in New York City to Irving Ballen and Adrienne Ballen (née Miller), and was raised as Jewish. His dad was an attorney and the founding co-conspirator of McLaughlin, Stern. His mother was a devotee of the famous photo agency Magnum from 1963 to 1967 prior to commencement the Photography House Gallery once Inge Bondi in New York City in 1968. Ballen became acquainted later than the photographs of Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson either from published photographs in albums or through personal acquaintance. He attended Scarborough School, New York, and went to Camp Stinson during his childhood summers. At age 13, he standard his first camera, and was soon after employed for a first personal ad job of photographing McDonald’s, Mamaroneck, New York. Ballen was curious in the truth of Rembrandt from a pubescent age, and was drawn to photographing elderly men. He recalls that one of the most “vivid and pivotal moment in his liveliness occurred in 1968 when parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera for high intellectual graduation. On the very thesame day went to the outskirts of Sing Sing Prison near New York city to accept photographs”.
He innovative studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, which was an epicenter for the 1960s counter-culture. Here, he was exposed to R. D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry movement, Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious”, the Theatre of the Absurd (Pinter, Beckett and Ionesco) and existential philosophers, such as Sartre and Heidegger, all of which came to be formative in the increase of his artistic style. During the summer of 1969, he photographed Woodstock, a series which was published in the New York Times 50th anniversary of the iconic music festival. Ballen notes that capturing Woodstock “played a role in getting to know the human experience, human endeavour, finding the moment, working as soon as people, searching in difficult circumstances for something that stood out. If I had to say what are important aspects that control through the work, it’s exasperating to enter upon terms with firm chaos.” Ballen made his first film Ill Wind after completing a course in film making in 1972.
After the death of his mother Adrienne in 1973, he, like many of the counter-culture, developed existential yearning in admission aversion to the hoarding of Western intervention and his suburban upbringing. He spent the subsequent five months Art Students of League of New York. Here, he painted art brut, primitivist, paintings, that according to his teacher, “belonged in the Stone Age”. In the autumn of 1973, yearning to find Conrad’s “heart of darkness” and Eastern nirvana, he left embarked upon a five-year journey, that would accept him by estate from Cairo to Cape Town; Istanbul to New Guinea (1973-1978). On this trip, he continued an ongoing captivation in taking pictures of enigmatic men against dramatic surfaces of shrines, temples and markets. He furthermore began a series of ‘field photographs’ of streets, earthen paths or walls (inspired by the colour arena painting movement) and developed an fascination in observing the cartoon of minor boys. He kept Kodak Tri-X or Plus X film a green canvas knapsack which he would tie to his legs during meals or overnight train rides or tied to hotel bedposts. He processed the film and would send it to his father in New York.
On this trip, he arrived in South Africa, where he met his higher wife, an artist, paper-maker and art teacher, Lynda Moross, whom he married in 1980, and had twins, Amanda and Paul, in 1989. These travels after that spurred on his first photographic photograph album entitled Boyhood, which was a series of universal, iconic images of boys that Ballen had encountered even if seeking to recreate his childhood in the adventure of travel. Disillusioned by the idea of advertisement photography, Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he usual in PhD in Mineral Economics in 1981. He permanently contracted in Johannesburg in 1982, where he worked as a self-employed mining pioneer until 2010. This profession took him into the South African countryside in which he travelled to remote little villages called “dorps” and rural areas referred to as the “platteland”, in which he photographed the marginalized whites who once honored from Apartheid, but who were now on your own and economically deprived. During this time, he worked contiguously with his master printer and friend, Dennis da Silva. After 1994, he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter, finding it closer to house in Johannesburg, where he continues to work. Since 2007, he has worked next door to with his art director, Marguerite Rossouw.
In 2018, Ballen received an Honorary Doctorate in Art and Design from Kingston University. In 2008, the Roger Ballen Foundation was founded to make known the advancement of education of photography in Africa. From April 2020, it will be housed in the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Art, Forest Town, Johannesburg.
Last update 2021-08-06