Roger Ballen at Gagosian - Brief Article

New York-born photographer Roger Ballen, who won the top prize at this year's Aries Festival in France, has been based in Johannesburg for the last two decades. This show presented his black-and-white portraits of the downtrodden South African laborers, white and black, who live in shantytowns just beyond the city's limits. Ballen's stark, visceral images, which have been collected in a book titled Outland (Phaidon, 2001), hark back to vintage Walker Evans and also have some of the surreal strangeness of Diane Arbus's portraits of social misfits. In contrast to Evans and Arbus, however, Ballen befriends his subjects and encourages their active participation in the way they will be photographed.

The portrait Caisie and Dresie, Twins, Western Transvaal (1993), is a picture of twin brothers whose oddly shaped heads and almost frightening countenances suggest some kind of mental impairment. They stare at the camera with a certain complicity, as if sharing a private joke with each other. Scrap Collector Holding Globe (1998) shows a shirtless man in shorts standing on a filthy foam mattress. Although, as the title indicates, he holds a globe, his eyes are fixed at a distant point on the floor. A sleeping dog lies at his feet. Man Bending Over (1998) shows a tall, long-armed, white-haired man gazing at the camera as he strikes a balletlike pose.

Ballen photographs his subjects in their shabby, prison cell-like living quarters. Graffiti is scratched into the dirty walls, electrical wires dangle, lamps without shades sit atop decrepit furniture. If one doesn't respond to these squalid settings and impoverished lives with pity, it's because the "outlanders," who obviously relish the attention that Ballen shows them, seem to be having too much fun posing for his sympathetic camera.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group