Roger Ballen, “Untitled”, 2018

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A few years ago, the South Africa based arts Roger Ballen started working with Polaroid-like one minute photographs, mostly Instax Fujifilm. You immediately recognize that you have journeyed into his “Ballensque” territory. But the artist’s visual report here is very different from what has become familiar in his work: square format, black and white with sharp detail of a disquieting world.

Ballen has been making and publishing images for 40 years, but it was his book “Outland” in 2000 that brought him into the public eye. His reputation was made on imaginative captures of people and animals in unexpected environments. All of it seemed more than odd. Ballen prefers to call this “shadowy” as opposed to “dark”.*1 The work has always been thoughtful and expertly imagined and managed.

Slow. Careful. Bent.

The challenge for the viewer is to throw off the shackles of judgment, to reject cynicism and entitlement and disdain for the unfamiliar and elitism, racism and classism. Start there.

These newer works are like stills from a movie in Ballen’s head made as he moves thorough these environments where he seems unguarded, even delighted; he is at ease. This seems like home.

The image presented is what he sees, or what he quickly assembles to see, as if to wonder out loud “what if”. “What if” I move this into the frame or put these disparate things together and photograph that? These don’t seem like found places other than in his head.

Ballen approaches this art making like Andre Breton seeking “the systematic derangement of all the senses”.*2 The art, the pleasure, is in our confusion or befuddlement. This is what flashes before Ballen and us in this waking dream.

In his introduction to “The Shadow Chamber”, curator Robert Sobieszek offers that “to discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may not be only futile but missing the point.”*3

You’re a guest here. Pay attention.

It is revealing of something that these works are color, or rather in color. This is color film. There is some bold red but not very much. Mostly it is somber - blacks, whites, grays and brown, all parts of Ballen’s shadow alluded to above. Also the rectangular format, as opposed to square, supports the restlessness in the work. These images are closer to a reportage rather than formal portraiture or still life. They are fully considered but less composed.

There is very little depth or dimension in these images; it is as if the subject matter already rests on a wall or shelf or in a corner. There are no recognizable people either, although there are some heads, some limbs, and, notably, hands that seem to beckon or guide us onwards. We can marvel at the origin and intention of the crudely drawn faces — specters and spectators.

Ballen doesn’t seem to want to shock us, perhaps just to poke a bit, to urge us to be sharp, to see. Wake up.

*1 correspondence between the author and artist, 2018

*2 from Breton’s 1924 manifesto La Revolution Surrealiste

*3 Robert Sobieszek “The Shadow Chamber”, LACMA

Adapted from an essay commissioned for “Roger Ballen, Polaroids: Volume Two”, (2019), Reflex Gallery, Amsterdam

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