Artist and photographer Roger Ballen hopes his work, Asylum of the Birds, will haunt you.
Inside Roger Ballen’s Mind: A Place of Refuge and Madness
An asylum can be either a refuge or a place of madness. In Roger Ballen’s new book, “Asylum of the Birds,” it is both. His photographs were taken in Johannesburg in a dilapidated house that was inhabited by hundreds of birds – and dozens of immigrants, fugitives or homeless people.
Roger Ballen – Lines and Marks of the Psyche
Roger Ballen has been getting a lot of attention lately for his numerous exhibitions in many different countries. He is about to launch a new body of work, “Asylum of the Birds”, which takes his photography in a whole new direction. Peggy Sue Amison spoke with Roger recently about the launch of this new project […]
Roger Ballen Interview
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.
The Descent into the Asylum – Roger Ballen’s new works
“Photography is like going into the mineshaft”, says Roger Ballen, and well he should know. As a geologist, his fieldwork sometimes has taken him 2 kilometers under the earth’s surface, in search of diamonds, gold, and other minerals. These subterranean pursuits have deeply influenced him, supporting his artistic development, which he likens to a psychological […]
Zoning In. An interview with Roger Ballen.
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 […]
Roger Ballen: The Asylum
Today, leafing through Roger Ballen’s 2005 publication Shadow Chamber, one becomes aware of an element that might have passed almost unnoticed when that book first came out. The photographer, whose book Outland had been published in 2001, opened this new volume with four images: a portrait, comparable to those that had initially brought attention to […]
The Roger Ballen Strategies
“I’ve always thought that a believable, genuinely realistic ambiguity constitutes the greatest form of expression. And for different reasons. Firstly, nobody likes the truth of what is going on to be explained to him. And what is perhaps even more important is that nobody actually knows what is real or what really is going on.” […]
Roger Ballen at the George Eastman House
Dream-sense can be unsettling in its dense, archetypal symbolism, and while some will argue that it’s nothing more than the brain defragging the mess of information it must process, it’s the sense that most interests Johannesburg, South Africa-based American photographer Roger Ballen, whose work can be seen at the George Eastman House through June 6.
Gagosian Gallery
No photographic, or even artistic, category quite encompasses the complicated, engrossing, and at times unsettling images in South Africa-based artist Roger Ballen’s new series Boarding House, 2003-2008, several dozen images from which made up this large exhibition.