Eulogy, 2004

South African photographer Roger Ballen didn’t actually begin posing his subjects until the mid ’90s. Prior to that, his photographs, though atmospheric and disturbing, were nonetheless pieces of journalism—candid photos of South Africa’s poor white families presented as historical truths. He shifted his approach with acclaimed books such as Outland and Shadow Chamber, and he builds on those with his forthcoming new effort, Boarding House (Phaidon), a gritty collection of images taken inside an imagined South African boarding house, which epitomizes the truth-via-fiction style that has defined the last twenty years of Ballen’s career. The transience of the photographs evokes an unnerving sense of waking dreams (or nightmares): a boy stands hunched over a chicken’s corpse, playing the accordion; a young girl in an oversized white dress scrawls on filthy walls with chalk; a baby doll nestles in thorny faux tree branches as a dog sleeps below. The work displays a private code of childhood symbols that would require a cryptologist and a shrink to crack, but the alienating, uncomfortable pictures also produce a strange sense of intimacy. It’s that tension between the familiar and the strange which makes Ballen a unique force to be reckoned with in the realm of socially active artists.

KEYWORDS: art, books, photography, Roger Ballen, South Africa

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