Roger Ballen in Conversation
Sunday, November 15th, 2009On Monday night, the 9th of November, I had the real privilege of participating in a conversation with Roger Ballen live at the SVA auditorium on 23rd street in Manhattan. Roger Ballen’s work has fascinated me for a long time, and I was thrilled to be able to engage him in dialogue before an audience in New York City. Hosted by SVA and introduced by Chair of the Photography Department, Stephen Frailey, the evening proved to be one of riveting photographs and thought-provoking dialogue. My own introductory notes are below, followed by a video of the evening as well as two passage—one from C.G. Jung and another from Robert Sobieszek’s essay for Shadow Chamber—that I used during the on-stage conversation.
Darius Himes, Introduction to Roger Ballen:
“From any objective viewpoint, Roger Ballen operates as a one-man school of photography. For more than two decades, he has developed a style of image-making that is firmly rooted in the documentary tradition of the great mid-century storytellers, but which has consistently taken the notion of a photographic “document” as a mere starting point for an ever-deepening exploration into the human subconscious.
Roger Ballen grew up in New York under the familial influence of the Magnum clique of photographers; his mother ran the New York office of the famous agency for many years when he was a child, and young Roger considered Henri, Bruce, and Elliott as so many uncles and tutors. He left the City behind—and the safety of that world—immediately after university, spending 5 years on the road, traveling to such far-flung places as Istanbul and Papua New Guinea. Eventually he settled in South Africa and found work according to his formal training, as a geologist. His travels to the back-country of that country, and in particular around Johannesburg, provided occasion for a continued sustained photographic exploration, which his first two published books of photographs bear out.
The common and underprivileged residents of rural South Africa have remained his “subjects” over the years. But where he began with a simple documentary approach, portraying them and their homes, he has wandered into an imaginative middle-ground that is informed by the world he inhabits, but which is at least equally conjured as it is found.
In many ways, Ballen is seduced by the infinitude of detail that a well-exposed, traditional gelatin-silver negative and print can offer up. His camera-mounted flash serves a double function of flooding a room with light, and thus providing more detail, while simultaneously pushing the shadows towards a deeper shade of black. This photographic approach—detail surrounded by inky blacks—serves the goal he cultivates, which is far more psychological, more Jungian in nature, than most photographers ever attempt. It has been his “goal as an artist … to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision,” where meaning can “be layered and reveal an aesthetic that is [as] ambiguous as it is mysterious.”
In his stunning introductory essay for Shadow Chamber, Ballen’s second most recent book, Robert Sobieszek stated this effect as follows: “Ballen senses that documentary is more fluid than fixed. His photography has glided easily from the clinical chart to the dramatic script over the years, and his art tests our very conception of the reporting photographer creating tableaux that speak to, and not just about, our human condition.”
Boarding House, Bllen’s most recent book, (out this Spring from Phaidon) continues this rich, penetrating vision. Mark-making, sculpture, theater and photography are all deftly woven together to create a cast of characters—animals as often as humans—that stand firmly before the camera, in real space and time, and yet somehow shimmer on the edge of immateriality, leaping out from a fantasy realm for a brief moment, only to recede into the unconscious the next. He has transformed a technical vocabulary and drafted a dark poem infused with all of the struggles and turmoil of our modern lives. As Sobieszek mused, “little more can be expected of art.”
Roger Ballen in conversation from andrew hetherington on Vimeo.
“Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.” para 261.
Archetypes were, and still are, living psychic forces that demand to be taken seriously, and they have a strange way of making sure of their effect. Always they were the bringers of protection and salvation, and their violation has as its consequence the ‘perils of the soul’ known to us from the psychology of primitives. Moreover, they are the unfailing causes of neurotic and even psychotic disorders, behaving exactly like neglected or maltreated physical organs or organic functional systems.
… For this reason the scientific intellect is always inclined to put on airs of enlightenment in the hope of banishing the spectre once and for all.”
C. G. Jung, The Archtetypes and the Collective Unconsicous (Para 266–267)
“‘Relentlessly meaningful, yet resistant to logic,’ the characters are actors without audiences, acting out their distress, reduced to the ‘forced extroversion of all interiority’. This is no longer documentary expression in the classic sense; Ballen now explores the truly unphotographable margins of the human condition in his work, where anything is possible and surfaces count for little or are in constant flux.”
“One of the most lasting lessons about photography left us by the French critic Roland Barthes is that while all photographs are ‘contingent’, none are, by themselves, ‘coded’. For any clarity of interpretation or reading, a gloss or caption is required, some sort of text that explains what is going on in the image. Picture editors, museum curators and educators depend on such glosses. Artists usually do not. Everything in Ballen’s recent photographs clearly happened in front of the camera, what we see took place as the shutter was released; because he does not deal with digital imaging, everything was absolutely present and contingent. To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may be not only futile but missing the point.” —Robert Sobieszek, Shadow Chamber