Katie Kitamura
28 October 2001 – 17 February 2002.
With remarkable speed American photographer Roger Ballen has emerged as one
of the most controversial and celebrated photographers around. What is so
curious about the recent frenzy around Ballen is the fact that he has been
steadily producing a consistent body of work over the past two decades. His
most recent exhibition, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany,
functions as a retrospective show, covering a vast body of work that spans
some twenty years.
Photographing the ‘poor white’ population in South Africa, he produces
images that resonate on political, psychological and aesthetic levels; this
is perhaps the great strength of his work. Ironically, the multi-perspectival
quality that characterises Ballen’s work has often been reduced to
simplistic interpretations – such as the Independent’s headline earlier this
year, ‘The Photographer South Africa Loves to Hate’. Despite repeated
comparisons with the likes of Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, Ballen’s
photography nonetheless has often been discussed simply within the context
of social exploitation or moral controversy. However, having been
shortlisted for this year’s Citigroup Photography Prize alongside well
established photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Thomas Ruff,
Ballen seems to have established his position in the contemporary art scene,
above and apart from the controversy around the images he produces.
Ballen is best known for his portraits, some of which are well on their way
to becoming iconic. The most well known of these must be the famous image of
the ‘drooling’ twins, Caisie and Driesie; what completes and nuances the
image is the disjunction between the disarray of the twins’ physical
appearance and the pointed awareness in their eyes. But some of the best
images are not portraits so much as images ‘about’ representation. These are
images about self-representation, or rather, about the compulsive need to
create a self-image, and the final failures of that representation. In
Untitled, a young boy compulsively chalks self-portraits on the wall, until
his own face is surrounded by a spattering of tragically comic self-images.
Ballen has also created a remarkably persuasive series of photographs of
room interiors featuring kitsch family portraits, and the gross
approximation of these attempts at portraiture are at once discomforting and
haunting. The photographs themselves are perfectly composed images, and the
evenness of that composition only serves to emphasise the gauche hysteria of
those less adept attempts at representation.
While some of Ballen’s earlier documentary style photographs chart the rural
areas of South Africa, recent work has gradually progressed inside, into the
claustrophobic territory of these interior landscapes. The interiority is
both literal and psychological; Ballen is most successful when he creates
interiors that seem sealed within their own logic. Rats on Kitchen Table and
Head Below Wires are images composed of tangled wires that visibly form a
language of their own; deciphering and decoding that language, however,
proves impossible. These are images that are more explicitly psychological
than the earlier portrait inclined work; if those portraits captured the
persona of a deranged psychological state, then these more recent images
attempt to convey the psychosis itself.
Speaking of his relationship to the subjects in the photographs, Ballen
says, ‘When I look at these photographs, I see myself’. Which is something
of a remarkable statement, not least of all because of the psychological
interiority it suggests. These images do succeed in creating a
claustrophobia that very much seems to operate upon its own terms and
according to its own logic. To penetrate that interiority the viewer
ultimately has to take those terms into account. But what elevates Ballen’s
work beyond the possible simplicities of interiority is the universality
that underpins the work – these are finally non-specific images about
humanity as a whole, everywhere and at all times.
Roger F Ballen: OUTLAND is at Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany,