SPIRITS AND SPACES
2018 - 2026
Spirits and Spaces (Thames & Hudson, 2025) marks a significant evolution in Ballen’s photographic practice. After five decades working exclusively in black-and-white, Ballen began experimenting with colour in 2016 after receiving a Leica SL, opening new possibilities for light, atmosphere and constructed space. By 2018, he was working almost exclusively in colour, while retaining the muted tonal qualities of his earlier photographs—an approach he describes as “black-and-white in colour.” Created with artistic director Marguerite Rossouw, the photographs stage animals, objects, art brut-like drawings and fragmented human figures within claustrophobic environments constructed from worn, wallpapered wooden panels. Within these dense spaces, absurdity, chaos, comedy and tragedy coexist, while humanity is often reduced to anonymous figures or isolated body parts. Colour further complicates the relationship between reality and fiction, heightening the ambiguity of the photographs and extending the Ballenesque into new psychological territory.
ROGER'S RATS
2014 - 2018
In Roger’s Rats, Ballen’s subjects became almost exclusively rats. For Ballen animals carry archetypal meanings shaped by human culture and mythology. While birds are associated with the sky and transcendence, rats have traditionally been connected to dirt, disease, disorder and darkness. Ballen challenges these associations, seeing the rat itself as an innocent creature onto which humans project ideas of fear and evil. Ballen has described the animal as a metaphor for the Freudian notion of the id: instinctive, unselfconscious and capable of revealing something about the deeper parts of human behaviour. In Roger’s Rats then, the animal becomes both subject and psychological symbol. The photographs explore the tension between what the rat actually is and what humans imagine it to be, reflecting the artist’s broader interest in appearance and reality and in using photography to externalise the darker, less rational dimensions of the human psyche.
THEATRE OF APPARITIONS 2006-2016
Theatre of Apparitions (Thames & Hudson,2016) is Ballen’s haunting exploration of the mind as a house of buried narratives. Created with his long-term collaborator Marguerite Rossouw, the series was inspired by carvings discovered on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison. Using spray paint, resins, emulsions and sharp tools on glass, Ballen and Rossouw created cave-like images in which dismembered figures and ghostly forms emerge
from the darkness. The series formed the basis of Ballen’s exhibition when he was selected to represent South Africa at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Presented as illuminated lightboxes, the works transformed the interplay of darkness and light already central to the photographs into a physical experience. This exploration of an imagined underworld has since found another context in Dante’s Inferno, for which 67 works from the series were selected. The project marked the first time Dante’s text had been interpreted through photography, bringing Ballen’s psychological underworld into dialogue with Dante’s journey through the realms of
the dead
BOARDING HOUSE
2001-2009
In Boarding House (Phaidon, 2009), Roger Ballen moves further from documentary photography towards complex and psychological world. Made primarily between 2005 and 2008, the photographs bring together fragmented bodies, animals, drawings and discarded objects within increasingly complex compositions. Ballen explains that the works “rarely feature the face of a live human subject, ” allowing other elements within the photograph to assume greater significance. Drawings extend into three-dimensional assemblages, while rusted metal, broken furniture, toys and other debris are removed from their original functions and transformed into a new visual reality. Incorporating elements of art brut and Surrealism, these enigmatic spaces evoke subconscious states rather than
straightforward narratives. For Ballen, Boarding House represented a profound psychological breakthrough: during the project, he “broke through into a part of my mind that I never knew existed, ” a place he believed exists within most people.
SHADOW CHAMBER
2001 - 2005
Shadow Chamber (Phaidon, 2005) marks a decisive transition in Ballen’s practice, and the series shows how the artist’s attention shifted from the external world towards the psychological and internal. Most photographs were made in a dilapidated building outside Johannesburg, where small, cell-like rooms became both physical settings and spaces associated with darker dimensions of human experience. During the project, portraiture gradually receded as drawings, animals, objects and surfaces assumed greater importance. Scribbles, smudges, cut-outs, masks and wires transformed walls from backgrounds into subjects in themselves, while drawing became increasingly integrated into Ballen’s compositions. Central to the series was Ballen’s question of whether chaos or order dominates the human condition. Although he concluded that chaos prevails, his photographs transformed visual disorder into formal coherence. Incorporating elements of Art Brut and Surrealism, Shadow Chamber moved beyond conventional documentary photography towards a theatrical, constructed and increasingly psychological visual language
ASYLUM OF BIRDS
2006 - 2014
In Asylum of the Birds (Thames & Hudson, 2014), Ballen creates a psychologically charged world in which birds, animals, fragmented human bodies, drawings and discarded objects coexist within enigmatic spaces. The photographs were made in a rambling house on the outskirts of Johannesburg, its walls covered with drawings, stains, dangling wires and unusual objects. Birds, which had appeared throughout Ballen’s earlier work, become the central protagonists. No longer associated simply with flight or the heavens, they inhabit a world of chaos, ambiguity, violence and death.” The contrast between the birds and the unsettling environment of the “Asylum” became the project’s primary metaphor. The series also reflects Ballen’s concern with humanity’s relationship to nature, which he describes as “essentially adversarial and exploitative.” These enclosed spaces ultimately evoke an irrational world where “delirium, mirage, dreams and nightmares coexist.”
OUTLAND1995 - 2000
Outland (first published by Phaidon, 2001) marks a decisive shift in Ballen’s practice from the frontal portraiture of Platteland towards a more complex and psychological form of image-making. From 1997, his human and animal subjects increasingly became actors within what he describes as a “silent theatre staged in a minimalistic world,” with specific references to South Africa stripped away in favour of more universal states of human existence. For Ballen, Outland is a “a place of the mind, populated by figures who appear trapped, disoriented and powerless, their eyes revealing what he saw as a deeper psychological core. The series also marked an important development in his approach to line and surface. Rather than simply photographing existing marks, Ballen began actively introducing lines into the image, positioning tangled wires against worn walls in the same way as marks are made in drawing s on paper. The dilapidated, disordered interiors of Outland became psychological spaces through which the uncertainty of human existence is explored.
DORPS AND PLATTELAND 1982 -1994
In the 1980s, while working as a geologist and travelling through rural South Africa, Ballen began photographing the small towns, or dorps, he encountered. The resulting series, Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa ( Published by Hirt & Carter, 1986 ), marked an important shift in his practice. Moving from 35mm photography to the square-format Rolleiflex, his images became slower, more deliberate and formally composed. He increasingly moved from streets and buildings into domestic interiors, where walls, marks, wires, stains and objects began to shape the image. This transition deepened in Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (Published by William Waterman Publications, 1994), made between 1986 and 1994, in which Ballen photographed marginalised white communities during the final years of
apartheid. Here, the documentary impulse became increasingly psychological: frontal portraits, enclosed interiors and what Ballen called the “living wall” transformed physical environments into expressions of alienation and states of mind, establishing elements that would become fundamental to the Ballenesque aesthetic.
BOYHOOD 1973 - 1978
Boyhood (1979), Roger Ballen’s first published photographic book, emerged from his extensive travels through Africa, Asia and other parts of the world during the 1970s. Drawn to the seemingly universal qualities of childhood, Ballen photographed boys across different countries and cultures, observing their instinctive behaviour, curiosity, friendships and growing independence. He was particularly interested in the period when boys begin to explore the world beyond the family home, forming close bonds with one another through play, adventure and shared discovery.
The series was also deeply personal. Through his encounters with the boys he photographed, Ballen began to reconnect with memories of his own childhood. Photographs such as Pals (1977) reflect his fascination with the intense friendships of boyhood, while Froggy Boy (1977) demonstrates his developing attention to the formal relationships between figures, animals and their surroundings. Although rooted in street and documentary photography, these images reveal an increasing awareness of composition, gesture, line and the expressive possibilities of ordinary encounters.
Published by Chelsea House in 1979, Boyhood marked an important stage in Ballen’s artistic development. The series brought together his interest in the human condition with an increasingly deliberate photographic language, establishing foundations that would continue to inform his later work.
VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS 1967 -1978
Roger Ballen’s vintage photographs trace the formative years of an artistic practice that would develop into the distinctive visual language known as the Ballenesque. Beginning in the late 1960s, his early black-and-white photographs emerged from the traditions of street and documentary photography, informed by his encounters with the work of Paul Strand, André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yet even at this early stage, Ballen was drawn beyond the straightforward documentation of people and places, seeking images that revealed something of the psychological complexity, contradictions and absurdities of human existence.
Photographed across the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe during the 1970s, these early works demonstrate an increasingly deliberate attention to composition, line, shadow and the relationships between figures and their surroundings. Everyday encounters become visually enigmatic through unexpected juxtapositions, unusual perspectives and the interplay of human bodies, animals and architectural forms. Ballen's interest in textured walls, graffiti and incidental markings also begins to emerge, anticipating the graphic elements that would become central to his later photographs.
Although rooted in the observable world, these images reveal the foundations of Ballen's enduring investigation into the human condition. His fascination with outsiders, the psychological dimensions of ordinary life and the expressive possibilities of photographic composition would gradually lead him away from conventional documentary practice towards the constructed, theatrical and psychologically charged environments of his mature work. Seen retrospectively, the vintage photographs offer an important insight into the origins of the Ballenesque, revealing how its defining characteristics began to take shape long before they became an established artistic language.
PUBLICATIONS
