The Eye of Photography - Special Edition -Roger Ballen October 30, 2025
- Sarie Pretorius
- 12 hours ago
- 10 min read
WRITTEN BY JEAN-JACQUES NAUDET
Roger Ballen is one of the most astonishing and creative contemporary photographers.
A sublime retrospective book has just been published by Thames and Hudson.
A photography center bearing his name has just opened in Johannesburg.
And a mini-exhibition dedicated to him runs from November 5 to 15 at:
7 Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées Marcel Dassault, 75008 Paris, France.
Inside Out Centre for the Arts
48 Jan Smuts Ave.Forest Town, Johannesburg, South Africa 2193
Today’s edition is dedicated to him!
Jean-Jacques Naudet
Born in New York City, 1950, and based in Johannesburg, South Africa for over four decades, South Africa, Roger Ballen is one of the most important photographers of his generation. Through his unique, complex visual language, Ballen has made a lasting contribution to the field of art and photography. He has published over twenty-five books, and his photographs are collected by some of the most prominent museums in the world. Ballen is also the founder and executive director of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts and the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Johannesburg. The Centre aims to promote an awareness of International and African related issues through art, photography, and educational programmes.
Opened in 2025, just across the threshold from the Inside Out Centre for the Arts, Roger Ballen established the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, a space dedicated entirely to the medium of photography. The Centre combines exhibitions, research, and public programming, with a focus on photography’s experimental and conceptual frontiers.
Its inaugural exhibition, PSYCHOPOMP!, curated by Boris Eldagsen, explores the use of AI-generated imagery to investigate Jungian ideas of the unconscious and the shadow self. Through cutting-edge exhibitions and dialogue-driven events, the Centre encourages debate about how photography intersects with psychology, technology, and contemporary culture, both in Africa and globally.
Highlights in the upcoming program include the celebration of Roger Ballen’s new publication, Spirits and Spaces, published by Thames & Hudson, with the exhibition “Chaos Has Many Faces” opening at the end of October 2025. The Centre will then open 2026 with an exhibition on African fashion photography, showcasing leading photographers in the field as selected by seminal African fashion designers.
In late February 2026, the Centre will host the inaugural Todi Johannesburg Photography Circle, bringing together twelve of the most prominent international and African photography experts for a week-long gathering in Johannesburg to discuss the business of photography, explore issues unique to the African context, and develop strategies for the promotion and future of photography worldwide, seen through an African lens.
Interview with Amanda Ballen, September 2025.
Amanda Ballen : In your sixty-year career you have developed a unique and distinctive aesthetic called the “Ballenesque.” What are the key characteristics of this style?
Roger Ballen : The term “Ballenesque” was first introduced by Professor Robert Young in his introduction to my retrospective book of the same name, published by Thames & Hudson in 2016 and a second edition in 2022. While the Ballenesque aesthetic resists strict definition, Young identified several recurring characteristics:
A Ballenesque image typically conveys a psychologically charged atmosphere. Combinations of objects are surreal and there is a visual tension often created from the interplay of opposites: order and chaos, familiarity and strangeness, the rational and the irrational. The settings are most often confined, windowless interiors that appear detached from the outside world, functioning as visual embodiments of the subconscious mind. The human figures who inhabit these spaces (especially in my earlier bodies of work) are frequently individuals living on the margins of society. Their gaze is both intimate and inaccessible, provoking a complex and ambivalent emotional response.
Further, Ballenesque environments are further populated with objects, animals, and hand-drawn marks. Their arrangement often appears irrational or arbitrary, yet they mirror the disjunctions and unpredictability of dreams. The juxtaposition of human, animal, and inanimate elements disrupts conventional categories, producing an atmosphere that is simultaneously absurd, unsettling, and enigmatic.
Despite the impression of chaos, each photograph is anchored in a rigorous sense of formal composition. I am attentive to harmony, to the integration of line, shape, and spatial balance. Ultimately, the Ballenesque aesthetic is a visual language through which I investigate the complexities of the human psyche, aiming to draw the viewer into an experience that is both disquieting and compelling.
The psychological unconscious is perhaps the bedrock of your work—a vital apparatus that operates throughout your practice. How do your photographs open the unconscious mind? How should the viewer stand before your work to achieve such ends?
Roger Ballen : For me, the unconscious works best when there is disruption of habits of perception. Normally, our minds want to organise things—make a story, find categories, look for meaning—and my photographs try to destabilise that process. I think when the usual opposites collapse; real and unreal, truth and fiction, dream and nightmare, order and chaos or civilisation and nature, the unconscious starts to show itself.
For the viewer, the important thing is not to try to solve the picture. Try to stand in front of the image and allow the ambiguity to work on you. The photograph will not just be an object of your perception, but a reflection of something hidden within yourself. A good example is in my Theatre of Apparitions photographs. People see so many different things in those images—masks, skulls, animals that are half-human and half-beast, cave paintings, or figures from their dreams. The forms are ambiguous, which allow the viewer’s mind—or surface of the unconscious—to complete the image for themselves.
You are not merely a photographer but a multimedia artist, having engaged with sculpture, film, etching, painting, and even theatre. Yet drawing has become an essential part of your photographic practice, to the point where it challenges the very classification of the image as a ‘photograph.’ How did drawing develop in your work, and what function does it serve within your images?
Roger Ballen : Drawing has always been close to my photography. At first it showed up indirectly—through wires, cages, and bits of metal that ran like lines through the pictures. Later, in Outland, graffiti started to appear, and by Shadow Chamber and Boarding House, the scrawls and symbols were everywhere. With The Theatre of Apparitions, I turned fully to drawing, scratching into glass to make ghostly figures that felt like they came from cave walls or dreams. More recently, in my coloured Polaroids, I even use thick paint directly on the photographic surface.
The addition of drawing extends photography’s possibilities. While photography is often considered a window onto external reality, drawing is seen as an expressive gesture that emanates from the psyche or “hand.” Merging these two mediums creates an ambiguity around what is real and what is not.
But the drawings also possess a raw, instinctive quality that seems to come straight from the unconscious. We can relate this to the “psychic automatism” of the Surrealists. Drawings can also intervene in the composition by echoing forms or disrupting them. They can play with optics by reversing figure and ground or overlaying drawn and real bodies—they can flatten space. They can make the surface of a photograph feel more animated. For these reasons, I think drawing has a vital role to play in the creation of the “psychological landscapes” that are my photographs.
Over the years, the animals in your work seem to have shifted—from companions in Outland to estranged presences in Boarding House, and finally to protagonists in Roger the Rat. How has their role changed within your visual universe?
Roger Ballen : In my early works like Platteland and Outland, animals were part of everyday life—companions that reflected the realities of human existence. Later, in Shadow Chamber and Boarding House, they became estranged presences, unsettling figures in claustrophobic, surreal spaces. By Roger the Rat, the transformation was complete: the animal was no longer background but protagonist, claiming centre stage in the Ballenesque theatre. I have always been drawn to animals—I even studied Animal Psychology at university. My first exhibition at my museum in Johannesburg (The Inside Out Centre for the Arts) is entitled End of the Game and explores the history of the destruction of wildlife in Africa.
Wherever you look in my work, there are animals—under beds, on chairs, suspended on walls. You cannot escape them because the animal is deep inside; we come from the animal. In my work, the animal reflects what the human psyche tries to conceal—instinct, fear, vulnerability, domination—while also offering something we have lost: immediacy, purity, and presence. Animals do not perform; they simply are. By acknowledging this kinship, we move beyond illusions of human supremacy toward a more honest and integrated mode of being.
Your work is often described as characteristically “disturbing” or “dark.” How do you respond to this perception?
Roger Ballen : The word “dark” suggests fear, danger, or moral corruption. These associations come from deep cultural binaries; light versus dark, good versus evil, known versus unknown. Yet what people often call “dark” is simply what they do not wish to confront. My work engages with the unconscious, with those aspects of the psyche that are repressed or obscured. What disturbs the viewer is not violence or grotesquery in themselves, but the surfacing of what has been buried.
We associate darkness with fear because it points to the unknown, the unresolved. But darkness is not inherently negative. To me, it represents a psychological truth—more authentic than the sanitised images of everyday culture. I have always been drawn to Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow. He wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” This is the space my work seeks to inhabit: a confrontation with what lies beneath.
After working in black and white for most of your career, you have shifted decisively into colour. What does colour allow you to express that black and white could not?
Roger Ballen : The transition to colour began in 2016, when Leica loaned me a Leica SL and a zoom lens for the Ballenesque: Roger Ballen Retrospective Film. I asked myself: after decades of black and white, would colour dilute the essence of my work, or could it take me deeper into the same psychological terrain? To my surprise, many of the colour stills I made were more compelling than the black-and-white versions. What I discovered is that I do not see colour as bright pigments but as “monochromatic colour”—muted, tonal, subdued.
Does colour make my images feel more real, more tactile, more dimensional—or more surreal, spectral, absurd? Perhaps both at once. The shift from direct flash to LED lighting has only intensified this duality, creating atmospheres with greater depth and complexity. My palette is also complex. The images contain desaturated hues which suggest bleakness and decay, while sudden bursts of red or green break through with emotive or suggestive power. For me, the experience of colour is a deeply philosophical mystery (how do we know what colour the other sees? What is colour?). It is a phenomenological experience, a way to evoke, unsettle, and lead the viewer deeper into their own invisible realities.
In an era when the world is overwhelmed by an endless flood of images—circulating instantly, consumed and forgotten almost as quickly—what, in your view, is the fate of photography as an art form? And how can a photographer still carve out a visual language that resists this saturation and speaks with depth?
Roger Ballen : We live in a world flooded with images, most of them shallow and forgettable. The only way to rise above this noise is through discipline and persistence. I take photographs every day, because becoming an artist is like becoming an athlete—you must train constantly. Style cannot be copied or forced; it comes from years of work, from going deeper into your own vision and trusting your instincts. My advice is simple: keep practising, reference internal experience and not external images, and your own visual language will emerge.
Your vision has extended beyond photography to the creation of a physical environment: the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg, often described as a Ballenesque space. How did you conceive of this centre, and in what ways does it echo your artistic philosophy?
Roger Ballen : The Inside Out Centre for the Arts is a non-profit arts space I founded in Johannesburg to raise awareness of issues related to Africa through exhibitions and educational programmes. I founded the Roger Ballen Foundation in 2007, and sought out a space to house it for many years. In 2018, an amazing plot of land became available which was centrally located in the city, and which lay amidst two other museums. I approached the architect, Joe van Rooyen, to design the building. We opened it in 2023.
From the start, I conceived of it not simply as a museum but as an artwork in itself, a Ballenesque space that reflects the aesthetic philosophy running through my images. The building appears as a mysterious, Brutalist block, yet opens into a double-barrel exhibition hall where raw concrete blurs inside and outside, echoing the psychological process of turning the unconscious “inside out”—hence the name of the Centre. The undulating fence, suspended barrel, and play of shadow and light all resonate with my interest in ambiguity and surrealism. The name of the Centre also echoes its curatorial mission—to subvert ordinary schemas or ways of seeing, to invert assumptions, to turn visual expectations “inside out.”
Just as my photographs aim to unsettle conventional ways of seeing, the Centre offers a multimedia experience of photography, video, drawing, painting, installation, that challenges perception and invites visitors into a deeper confrontation with both society and the psyche.
You have recently added the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography onto the Inside Out Centre in Johannesburg. What was your vision for this new space, and how do you see it shaping the future of photography in South Africa?
Roger Ballen : I created the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography because South Africa has extraordinary photographic talent, yet very few spaces devoted entirely to the medium. Too often, local photographers are confined to documentary traditions or pushed to the margins of galleries focused on painting and sculpture. This Centre is intended as a dedicated platform—one that gives photography the visibility, support, and seriousness it deserves.
By hosting exhibitions, educational programmes, and community initiatives, we aim to create a space where South African voices can be strengthened and projected outward, entering into dialogue with the international photographic world. Calling it a “Centre” rather than a gallery is important: it signals a place of gathering, exchange, and experimentation, where photography is not only displayed but actively lived, discussed, and advanced.
Amanda Ballen is a writer, researcher and educator. She holds a Masters Degree in Literature and has published an array of art related writing, with a special interest in the philosophy of art, the aesthetics of beauty and ugliness, photography and arts education. Amanda Ballen is the daughter of Roger Ballen and currently lives in London, UK, with her husband and daughter.