Archive | Interviews

Roger Ballen is among the most talented and successful photographic artists in the world today. He was kind enough to agree to an extensive interview last month, and is also allowing us to publish images from two forthcoming books.

Robert Enright: You’ve talked about being inundated by photographs as a child because your mother was an editor at Magnum. Roger Ballen: There were all these pictures on the wall that had been given to us by various photographers, or which my mother bought. I ended up assimilating all sorts of pictures and by the […]

When Roger Ballen talks about his body of work, it is seldom in terms of social commentary. If the personal history of one of his sitters seems unavoidable, Ballen addresses the narrative only in the broadest possible way. To the artist, the images of small-town South Africa contain interplay of light and dark, painterly lines […]

Roger Ballen depict an abstracted imaginary space that is inhabited by both animals and people. Mostly within grey, barren cell-like structures, nightmarish scenarios, which are unspecific in their narrative, are enacted.

Chas Bowie is a writer and artist based in Portland, Oregon. He is the Arts Editor for the Portland Mercury, and his writings and photographs have appeared in publications such as Res, Anthem, Venus, and Tokion.

In the 90ties your photographs were more focussed on portraiture than today. Is it regardless still important for you to work in South Africa or could you realize these images everywhere?

Roger Ballen first gained widespread attention with the release of his third book, Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994). Since that time Ballen has expanded his vision and reputation by building outward from documentary portraiture into a highly complex, personal style, taking his photography into a fascinating, cryptic, vision of the human psyche.