Photographer · South Africa
Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen (born 1950) is an American-born photographer who has lived and worked in Johannesburg since 1982. His black-and-white photographs moved from documentary portraits of poor white South Africans in small country towns to staged, theatrical scenes that blur photography, drawing and sculpture, a style he calls "Ballenesque".
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From New York to Johannesburg
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. His mother worked at Magnum, the photo agency, and he took up photography at about thirteen. He took a BA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and later a doctorate in mineral economics, and for years he worked in mineral exploration. He moved to South Africa in 1982 and has lived in Johannesburg ever since. His first book, Boyhood, appeared in the late 1970s.
Dorps and Platteland
Travelling through the small towns of the platteland, the rural interior, Ballen began photographing the people he met there. The books Dorps (1986) and Platteland (1994) — square, frontal portraits of poor white South Africans in their homes — were admired and fiercely debated. Read next to the work of David Goldblatt, who also turned his camera on white South Africa, they show two very different ways of looking at the same society; that comparison is this site's own reading.
From documentary to theatre
From the late 1990s Ballen's work became increasingly staged. In books such as Outland (2001) and Shadow Chamber (2005), people, animals, wires, stains and drawings on walls are arranged in cramped rooms into images that feel closer to dreams, or nightmares, than to documents. After 2000 the people he first found on the margins of South African society became, in effect, a cast of actors working with him. The style, which he calls "Ballenesque", reached a new audience when he directed the music video for Die Antwoord's "I Fink U Freeky" in 2012, which won the award for best video at the Vila do Conde short film festival in Portugal that year.
His last analogue series were Asylum of the Birds, published by Thames & Hudson in March 2014, and Roger's Rats.
How to look at a Ballen
Start with the walls: the drawings on them are part of the pictures, not a backdrop. Then ask what is staged and what is found. The people are posed and the objects arranged, so each print is closer to a built set than to a snapshot. Notice the black and white, which flattens everything onto one surface and makes a hand, a wire and a stain equal. A curator of his 2023 show at the Museum Tinguely in Basel wrote that he probes the human psyche, confronting both himself and his viewers with questions of being and becoming; that is a better way into the pictures than asking where in South Africa they were made.
Exhibitions and where to see the work
In 2013 the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art presented a major retrospective of his work. Later shows include the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in 2016–17, the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in 2020, and, in 2021, The World According to Roger Ballen at the Hague Museum of Photography and a retrospective at the Kunstsammlung Jena. From 19 April to 29 October 2023 the Museum Tinguely in Basel showed Call of the Void, installed around a shack in the middle of the gallery with photographs from Asylum of the Birds and Roger's Rats on the walls. A 2026 show, Shadows of the Mind, opened at the National Art Museum of Moldova. The artist's own website lists the museums and galleries that show his work, and gallery biographies name the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum among the institutions that collect it; check each collection page for what is on view.
See also
African photography, Southern Africa, David Goldblatt, and our lists of South African photographers and African photographers.
