Book Review: Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces, F-STOP A Photography Magazine, October 2025
- Sarie Pretorius
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Book Review: Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces
October 12th, 2025 by Michael Ernest Sweet
(c) Roger Ballen
Many photographers work by responding to the world around them. They walk, they look, they frame. They hunt for images already present in the environment — waiting to be noticed, captured, claimed. Roger Ballen does something fundamentally different. He constructs the very worlds he photographs. The spirits, the spaces, the uncanny tableaux — these are not found but fabricated. They are as much the work as the resulting photographs. This is what distinguishes Ballen in a field often preoccupied with documentation. He is not merely a photographer of strange things; he is the architect of strangeness itself.
For more than fifty years, Ballen’s work has spoken in black and white. Monochrome was not simply a stylistic choice; it was a language he mastered — one that shaped the psychological and symbolic power of his images. That visual austerity became integral to the Ballenesque sensibility: surreal, unsettling, unmistakable. Now, in Spirits and Spaces, color enters his work not as decoration, but as disruption. Not as a departure, but as an expansion. The Ballenesque is now chromatic — and the results are simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, seductive and disquieting.
What makes this shift so remarkable is that Ballen’s voice remains intact. These new photographs are fresh not merely because they introduce color, but because they push his internal universe further — without compromising the visual syntax he has spent decades refining. It’s no small feat to evolve without erasure. The uncanny precision, the psychological tension, the sense of absurdity held in fragile equilibrium — it’s all still here, only now rendered with a new, vibrant unease.
(c) Roger Ballen
Returning to the earlier contrast: most photographers seek subjects outside themselves. Ballen does the opposite. His source material is interior — a deep reservoir of imagination, memory, instinct, and dream. He combines this inner vision with the skills of a draftsman, a painter, a set designer, and, ultimately, a photographer. The result is not simply a photograph, but a constructed psychic environment. His images function like staged hallucinations: formally rigorous, yet emotionally volatile. Complex, multimodal, and fiercely original. Think Cindy Sherman, but darker, more theatrical, and pushed to even stranger terrain.
I’ve known Roger Ballen for many years. He is a generous artist — thoughtful about his own work, and equally invested in fostering others. There’s a quiet integrity to the way he moves through the world, and a seriousness about the work that never lapses into pretension. Spirits and Spaces offers more of what we’ve come to value in Ballen’s practice: more madness, more rigor, more dark play. And now, color.
Crucially, color here is not a superficial shift in palette. It is not a marketing move, nor an aesthetic refresh. Ballen uses color the way Hendrix used his teeth, the way Pollock used his body, the way e.e. cummings broke the rules of grammar — as a radical extension of form. In Ballen’s hands, color becomes a kind of transgression: a tool to unsettle, to deepen, to distort. It stretches the emotional and psychological register of the Ballenesque into new dimensions. It expands the language without softening the voice.
(c) Roger Ballen
The book itself is well executed. The scale and reproduction quality serve the work. The introductory essays are clear and unobtrusive. The book is divided into thematic sections, each prefaced with short texts. Personally, I could do without these interruptions; I prefer photobooks to preserve a clean visual rhythm — text at the front or the back, not embedded. Additionally, the essay text is printed in a faint tone, nearly disappearing on the page. These are minor grievances. Overall, Thames & Hudson have done well, and this volume will stay in my collection.
(c) Roger Ballen
Just when it seemed Ballen had fully settled into the monochromatic terrain that defined his visual identity, he surprises us — and himself — by cracking open the door to color. Not tentatively, but fully, forcefully. And with that, he allows us to dream again — this time in saturated, searing, luminous color.
(c) Thames & Hudson / Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces
Format: HardcoverPages: 144Artwork: 91 color illustrationsSize: 11.4 in x 12.1 in x 0.7 inForthcoming: September 30th, 2025ISBN-10: 0500028923ISBN-13: 9780500028926
About Michael Ernest Sweet
Michael Ernest Sweet is a Canadian photographer, writer, and art critic. He is the author of The Human Fragment and Michael Sweet's Coney Island. Michael has written about photography for over a decade for publications such as the HuffPost, FStoppers, StreetPhotography.com, as well as print-based magazines like Photo Life and Digital Camera. He is the recipient of a Queen's Medal for significant contributions to the arts and education in Canada.