Roger Ballen Spirits and Spaces: The First Color Monograph and a Descent into the Ballenesque Mind, DODHO Magazine, 19 January 2026

Roger Ballen Spirits and Spaces: The First Color Monograph and a Descent into the Ballenesque Mind

Roger Ballen’s Spirits and Spaces marks his first major exploration of colour after five decades in black and white, expanding the Ballenesque universe into a haunting psychological landscape where space, instinct, and the unconscious collide.

Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces is a decisive book within the trajectory of one of the most influential photographers working today.

It is not simply his first major foray into colour after more than fifty years working almost exclusively in black and white, but a coherent, profound, and radical expansion of his visual and psychological universe.

For decades, the so-called “Ballenesque” has been built around enclosed interiors, marginal figures, animals, found objects, and primitive drawings that function less as narrative elements than as mental traces. In Spirits and Spaces, that world does not disappear; it intensifies. Colour does not soften the work or make it more accessible. Instead, it introduces new perceptual and emotional tensions. Ballen does not use colour descriptively or decoratively, but as a psychological, almost spiritual substance that thickens space and alters the relationship between what is visible and what remains unseen.

The title itself is key to understanding this shift. “Spirits” refers to the intangible: presences, invisible forces, unconscious impulses, echoes of memory and repression. “Spaces” points both to physical locations and to mental states. In Ballen’s work, space is never neutral. It becomes a psychic stage onto which fear, desire, childhood, violence, sexuality, and death are projected. The rooms he photographs operate as extensions of the unconscious, interior chambers where rational order collapses and opposites coexist without resolution.

The book is structured into six sections—Childhood, Spectre, Animus, Shadow, Libido, and Chaos—which function more as symbolic fields than as closed narrative chapters. In Childhood, infancy is stripped of nostalgia. Dolls, old portraits, fragmented bodies, and childlike drawings evoke an ambiguous territory where innocence and disturbance are inseparable. This is not childhood remembered tenderly, but an archaic state charged with primal impulses and fears.

Spectre introduces the logic of apparition and absence. Veiled figures, suspended bodies, ghostly faces, and dimly lit spaces suggest a world in which what we see always seems on the verge of vanishing. Here, colour—generally muted, earthy, greyed—reinforces a sense of transience and fragility, as if the images were caught between two states of being.

In Animus, animals take on a central role. They are not symbolic additions but extensions of the human condition itself. Ballen insists on the impossibility of escaping the animal: it is embedded deep within us. Dogs, birds, horses, and hybrid creatures inhabit scenes where the human body is fragmented or obscured, underscoring a vision of identity as unstable, shaped by instincts and forces beyond conscious control.

The section titled Shadow addresses the idea of the shadow as something that follows us everywhere and can never be fully explained. Light and colour play a crucial role here. Physical and psychological shadows merge, and the chromatic atmosphere contributes to a sense of unease, as though every visible form concealed another, darker layer beneath it.

Libido confronts the pulsional dimension of Ballen’s work directly. Desire, sexuality, and vital energy appear as inescapable forces, inscribed from birth into the very mechanism of consciousness. Bodies, often incomplete or transformed, suggest a sexuality stripped of romance, closer to instinct and discomfort. Colour does not aestheticize these scenes; it intensifies their strangeness and emotional charge.

Finally, Chaos crystallizes one of the book’s central ideas: the impossibility of fully ordering human experience. The photographed rooms become spaces where civilization and nature collide, where absurdity, comedy, and tragedy coexist without hierarchy. Ballen does not present chaos as an exception, but as a fundamental condition of existence.

One of the book’s most distinctive features is the integration of Art Brut–like drawings on walls, objects, and backgrounds. These primitive, almost childlike marks do not function as graphic embellishments, but as direct manifestations of the unconscious. By merging photography and drawing, Ballen destabilizes the boundary between document and creation, between what is “real” and what is imagined, reinforcing the sense that we are entering a mental territory rather than a recognizable place.

From a formal and technical standpoint, Spirits and Spaces benefits from the use of digital cameras and more flexible lighting, allowing for greater tonal depth and extreme sharpness even in scenes involving movement. Yet Ballen remains faithful to a core principle: he does not digitally manipulate his images. Everything visible in the photograph existed at the moment the shutter was released. As always in his work, the final image depends on recognizing the precise instant when objects, bodies, light, and space align.

Taken as a whole, Spirits and Spaces is not a rupture with Roger Ballen’s past, but a natural and courageous evolution. Colour does not contradict his earlier work; it expands and complicates it, introducing new layers of ambiguity and psychological depth. The book confirms that Ballen does not photograph the world as it is, but as it is experienced from the darkest, most absurd, and most enigmatic regions of the mind. It is a demanding, unsettling, and deeply hypnotic work that reaffirms Roger Ballen as a key figure in contemporary photography and as an artist still pushing, without concession, the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical.