On 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.”
“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
The semester has begun, and many of my friends and colleagues are back in their classrooms and lecture halls inspiring willing, ready students of higher education.
For me, this (lost) summer was a bit of a technological explosion: I updated this, my WordPress blog (actually, the team at Bad Feather updated it!); got permanently locked out of my FB page (Yes, that’s me. No, I can’t access it. Yes, FB has been notified and NO, they haven’t responded. Yes, my Twitter feed still goes to my status updates and makes it look like I’m actually on FB a lot…but I digress…). I also figured out how to best utilize Twitter (and TweetDeck) and love writing with it; I had fun with my Flip video; I geeked out on various Apps for my iPhone (and recorded an entire “live” album on my built-in Voice Memo App).
I also watched the people (and youth) of Iran challenge their government through the same “social media” networks that many use in frivolous ways on a daily basis, and I honored the imprisoned, innocent Baha’is in Iran who have spent over one year in jail for serving their country and promoting the oneness of humanity.
In addition to the frenetic-ness of the summer, I sat in awe and wonder as various absolutely amazing programs, utilities and apps were developed and released into our Internet-world. I was introduced to Tokbox, Qik, Shazam, and Blip.fm and began using them regularly.
With bluetooth capabilities in our cars, Pandora.com playing on our iPhones, Skype on the laptops and massive file sharing through any number of online services, I began to feel rather Jetsonian. I just need to find Rosie the Robot to complete the picture.
But then I came across this passage (online, of course) by Thoreau:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” —Thoreau, Walden
These two passages instantly resonated with me and my inner dialogue felt stimulated, nourished and challenged. I both agree and disagree with Thoreau and Benjamin. Many of the “inventions” I came across this summer are not much more than “pretty toys” and fall into the entertainment category. In fact, depending on how you use them, all of these tools could reside at the level of superficial entertainment.
But that is precisely the point. It depends on how you use them. For example: the people of Iran (primarily young adults) were able to publicize on a hitherto unprecedented international level what they saw as rigged election results by the Iranian government through utilizing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Protests, beatings, police crackdowns and deaths were all placed directly in front of the eyes of the people of the world to see and bear witness to. No longer could a government simply drive over to the TV and radio stations and easily shut down the stream of information flowing to the outside world. Every single person with a cell phone or a PDA was a potential broadcaster in a worldwide sea of journalists. It was truly amazing to watch and follow (and I say that regardless of political positions).
That may beg the question, however: Why do we care what happens to people on the other side of the world? The answer (besides a much longer blog post) is that our world has shrunk to such a degree that we are all connected in ways that, as a human race, we have never been before.
Let me say that again: in the entire history of humanity, humans have never been thisin touch with each other—socially, politically, through commerce and the military, through ideas and religion and popular culture—ever before. New realities require new paradigms and new ways of existing. To many, it’s obvious that a new system of ordering society at the global and local levels to facilitate those social, political, commercial, popular culture connections is not only required but will inevitably be constructed. (And to be honest, to be alive at a time when the global body-politic of humanity is passing through such changes is about the most amazing, exciting thing I can even imagine, like witnessing a stormy teenager enter into a confident adulthood.)
Back to the point though. Benjamin’s wonderful observation, made nearly a century ago, is as much about the worth of the content published as it is about the ability to publish, held even more so now by any and all average citizens.
In the world of publishing (and photography book publishing specifically), there is a fascinating development going on in the form of print-on-demand books. As I state in my essay “Who Cares About Books” (published by LACMA in WordsWithoutPictures*), “An entirely new generation of curators, critics and photographers** see the book as a central form of expression in photography.” This appreciation of the book, coupled with the ease and accessibility of book production, thanks to companies like Blurb.com, has fueled a flood of new books, all printed out one at a time using technology that was unthinkable 15 years ago.
Anyway, the coolest tools of the age are all around us, and they only add to the great developments of the twentieth century. The ability to produce a book is only a few clicks away. The responsibility to produce worthwhile content, as Thoreau implies, is still there.
[For someone not at all related to photography but doing amazing book~literature~new media stuff, check out Barbara Hui. Her Litmap project, about Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W. G. Sebald will blow you away. Imagine Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History organized like this!]
* —join essayists and Charlotte Cotton in NYC September 17, 2009).
** —Markus Schaden (of Schaden.com, Europe’s best photobook store talks with Martin Parr about Parr’s newest book, Playas, published by Editorial RM)
To order the WordsWithoutPictures book (a print-on-demand title), click the image below. This is what will come in the mail (if you order two, that is):
There are David Sedaris “lovers” and “haters”. I’m an admirer, and when it comes to this particular story, I inevitably find myself nearly on the floor laughing, tears in my eyes. I remember the first time I came across this story. I could NOT stop laughing. Reading this out loud to my mother, Fay Himes, a former minister with an over-charged sense of humor, is one of my fondest memories. Listening to my mother as she enters into one of her laughing fits is like witnessing a force of Nature. It is awe-some, frightening, and mesmerizing all at once. It’s also impossible not to laugh with her. Mid-way through my reading of this story to her, she was on one knee, leaning out of her chair, her whole face red, tears streaming down her cheeks, laugh-screams coming out of her so loudly that they pierced through your whole body. Like I said, it’s one of my fondest memories. That, and listening to her sing and play “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” off the Life of Brian soundtrack on our family, upright piano.
If you haven’t read or heard this, I hope you enjoy. [Be warned, this approaches blasphemy for some. And remember, God loves laughter.]
“It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his-self Jesus, and, you know… like that.” “He call his-self Jesus and then he die one day on two morsels of lumber.” The rest of the class, jumps in offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm. “He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your Father.” “He make the good thing and on the Easter we be sad because someone make Him dead today.”
