Photo: Mimicry, 2005. © 2017 Roger Ballen
Photo: Roly Poly, USA, 1972. © 2017 Roger Ballen
When Roger Ballen graduated from high school in 1968, his parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera. It was flown over from Hong Kong by a friend and lost in customs for several weeks before it finally arrived. The day that Ballen received it, he headed to the outskirts of Sing Sing prison to take photographs, a prescient moment to launch a journey in photography like no other before or since.
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His name alone conjures up curious and disturbing visions of an uncanny world, one that recalls the spaces of the dreamscape, theaters of the unconscious. Here reality is a construction, but it is also something else: it is the space where our minds are released from rational sensibilities. To describe the work as unnerving would be polite. It is as though the non-linear spaces of the mind are given full flight.
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“A shadow runs through my work,” Ballen observes in the magnificent new book, Ballenesque: A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson). “The shadow spreads, grows deeper as I move on, grow older. The shadow is no longer indistinguishable from the person they call Roger. I track my shadow (life) through these images.”
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Ballenesque provides a road map through this life, bringing us along the trail that the shadow has traveled over the past five decades. One of his most telling photographs was taken at the very start, a photograph of a dead cat lying on a street in New York. Made in 1970, it has all the hallmarks of what is to come: the strange un-reality of this dead creature, a line that suggested the presence of the entry to a netherworld, an a car driving into the distance, into the great beyond.
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Photo: Stare, 2008. © 2017 Roger Ballen