BALLEN, Roger

About the US-American photographer Roger BALLEN (*1950 in New York)

Roger BALLEN was born the son of a New York gallery owner who was friends with Henri CARTIER-BRESSON, Marc RIBOUD and other Magnum photographers. He himself has been taking photographs since the age of fourteen. In 1974, he initially worked as a geologist in South Africa, which took him to the 'Dorps', remote white villages. He documented the poor dwellings, first from the outside and later also from the inside, and finally also their inhabitants. It was during this time that he created the famous double portrait 'Dresie and Casie'. He continued to search for forbidden places, such as the 'Shadow Chamber', 'Boarding House' and 'Asylum' - places where people who had suffered multiple harms had taken refuge. The inhabitants were prepared to act in his productions, so that his style mutated from documentary photography to fiction. He created images of a particularly dramatic nature. Roger BALLEN has lived in South Africa since the 1970s.

Photo books by and about the work of Roger BALLEN

• 'Boyhood' (1979, 2022); 'Dorps. Small Towns of South Africa, Hirt and Carter, Cape Town' (1986, 2012) ;'Platteland' (1994); 'Outland' (2001, 2015); 'Shadow Chamber' (2005, 2007); 'Boarding House' (2009); 'Animal Abstraction' (2012); 'Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen' (2013); 'I Fink U Freeky' (2013, together with Die Antwoord); 'Asylum of the Birds' (2014, 2019); 'Roger Ballen's People: South Africans through Portrait Photography' (2015); 'The House Project' (2015); 'The Theatre of Apparitions' (2016); 'No Joke (2016); 'Resurrected' (2016); 'Unleashed' (2017); 'Polaroids' (2017); 'Ballenesque. A Retrospective' (2017, 2022); 'The World According to Roger Ballen / Le monde selon' (2019, 2020); 'Roger the Rat' (2020); 'Des Oiseaux' (2022); 'Call of the Void' (2023)

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