Roger Ballen : Photography 1983-2011

30 Mar-13 May 2012

Overview

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa coming to photography after a career as a geologist and mining consultant. He is now recognised as one of the foremost South African photographers along with David Golblatt. He began his photography by recording the poor and dispossessed white population of South Africa in the area of the Platteland. His subjects are day labourers, scrapyard workers and security guards. More recently in his suite of works entitled Boarding House he has combined his subjects with contrived still-life compositions to create strange dreamlike psychological dramas within the confines of a boarding house near Johannesburg. Here poor transient workers, criminals on the run, witchdoctors and abandoned children are invited to take part in dramas that are like film sets replete with primitive drawings, sculptural elements, found objects and the pet dogs cats and birds that inhabit the boarding house together with the snakes, rats and insects which roam freely through it.