Roger Ballen’s photographs are simple black and white images. The reactions they provoke are far more complex. Brenda Atkinson delves beneath the surface
Arranging to interview Roger Ballen was becoming difficult. Not because he was difficult to get hold of, but because he insisted, holding me to the prospect like someone in a photograph, his photograph, a person pinned against a wall amid a linguine of telephone wires.
Still I was anxious to meet the photographer whose books Dorps and Platteland, Images of Rural South Africa, had provoked accusations of “coarse racism” with their publication. I also wanted to view the new images he had been working on in the last four years: would Ballen have considered the outcry surrounding his representations of platteland denizens as “freaks” and “grotesques”?
Armed with research and only a vague memory of Platteland’s images, haunted mostly by an image of a pair of identical male twins, retarded, drooling, their shirt-fronts stained with the day’s spit, I negotiated the echoing halls and arched recesses of the Reeva Forman building in Parktown, and was admitted to Ballen’s elegant rooms.
There were several rooms, roof-to-ceiling shelves sparsely occupied by exotic pieces, somewhere a secretary fielding calls and arranging important things. In a small side room I sat at a table, Ballen all the while standing behind me, and began to pore over a briefcase of some 300 black and white, 52cm by 52cm photographs.
As I paged, Ballen spoke, and I, somehow again against that wall, tried to follow the roads of his monologue, from Egypt to South Africa, from the platteland to Pretoria, from unease to aggression.
Although he is collected by such prestigious institutions as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, you won’t find many visual artists or documentary photographers in South Africa who are sympathetic to Ballen’s works.
While some will make concessions to his technical and aesthetic skill, most focus their distaste on the two books through which Ballen, a New York native and geologist by training, was presumptuous enough to regard the world as his visual field; images through which he (perhaps innocently) spilled the can of worms that is, in Andries Oliphant’s words “representational aesthetics” in this country.
Ballen’s apparent obsession with documenting the intimate circumstances of a socio-eocnomic underclass – the “poor whites” in his opinion marginalised by South Africa’s new political dispensation – smacks, for many, of an exploitative voyeurism, and a formal style that emphasises the fractured, freakish aspects of his human subjects.
Of course it might be argued that Ballen’s arguably most famous predecessor in this photographic genre, Diane Arbus, has received posthumous acclaim as a groundbreaking artist for doing exactly the same thing. But Ballen and Arbus are not in the same artistic league, and there remains a trace in Arbus’s visual language of a real empathy with the subjects whose bizarre worlds she claimed and occupied as her own.
Ballen is in the unfortunate position, in a xenophobic country, of being an “outsider”, and a wealthy outsider at that. Between his obligations as a scientist and photographer, his forays into the bleak worlds of his pictures are limited and, by his own admission, tinged with anxiety, an anxiety that becomes the viewer’s, the interviewer’s, own.
But Ballen wants to get away from all that, and so do I. I am with him because he currently has a show at Melkweg in Amsterdam, and another pending at Foto Forum in Frankfurt. He is excited about the wad of visual documents he has created in the last four years, and he wants the world to see.
I want to find in Ballen’s monologue a way to move beyond the negative hype, to absolve him of his theoretical bluntness, so I begin to try and make it a dialogue. Are the images set up? How do you negotiate consent? What are the complexities of the relationship between subject and photographer? How do you respond to the accusations that have been levelled?
What emerges is a torrent of thoughts, a tangle of contradictions, a slipping of agendas through the gaps of language, a confusion of derivative modernist cliches.
“There is never one way of negotiating consent; you develop a level of trust between yourself and your subject, who has to feel there’s a benefit. They like the attention; sometimes they may even like me. And I never set up the photographs; if I did they wouldn’t have the plasticity that they have. You can’t dictate the event or contrive the spark of the extra moment.”
Later this description will be expressed in terms of a cat-and-mouse game (“You’ve gotta play with the moment, be like a cat ready to pounce on the mouse”), and then in terms of a dog and a human being. “If a dog feels that it can trust you, your feeling gets passed to the dog; they just want to be treated well, and a lot of the communication or `negotiation’ with my images is like that, it’s non-verbal.”
He adds, “Most people in this class feel marginalised from the rest of culture, and they enjoy the attention and respect they get through this interaction. When they get the photos I give them they’re very excited. I never push a camera if people are uncomfortable.”
Ballen, I assume, must feel considerable conviction about this non-verbal process, because he later tells me that the dribbling twins whose photo he took couldn’t talk, and that one portrait – an upper-body shot of what looks like an animated corpse, hands raised (in supplication, benediction?), rolled eyeballs, sunken cheeks clinging to knife bones – is of a man who was blind, deaf and mute. Ballen works with this economic class because, he says, “the poor tend to reveal themselves through their faces. They have a presence, they aren’t adept with masks.”
In Ballen’s most recent work, there is a noticeable shift in the internal dynamics of the square images. His subjects seem to have a greater agency, a sense of their potential in this process, even of their performance. Their figures are cropped tightly into the backdrops of their domestic lives – corners, walls, beds and blankets. Their physical positions suggest their metaphysical, social, economic plight.
Certainly, they are posed, they pose, they even play. They wear masks, they interact almost ironically with objects, and with each other. I listen as he explains: “I’m not fascinated with poverty. I’ve been in every African country except one, I’ve lived with poor people for long periods of time. The psychological and physical presence I’m dealing with is found in a lower class of people. If I could find it in you I could transform you.”
Ballen of course cites Henri Cartier Bresson to underline the “essence” of his own photographic style and content: he wants to develop in his own images “a way of seeing intrinsic to the work”. He strives, he says, for “utter simplicity, complex statements and ambiguity”. He wants to “strip down social meaning” in the interests of a “pure” aesthetic; he is an artist, and then, a photographer.
Throughout all of this, Ballen’s own mask doesn’t slip. I have no idea who he is, what drives him, what his psychological hunt is about. I don’t know who I am, either; who his images make me, make everyone who views his work with discomfort and even revulsion. Are we afraid of the voyeurs in ourselves? Do we resent Ballen for making us look? Is it possible that the cultural, economic “others” he represents are not “other” enough? Are we – the consumers of art in the urban metropolis – haunted by their familiarity, rather than their strangeness?
I want to get away from the cloying despair of many of these images, from the otherness that is lit and shot and framed and presented for my aesthetic consumption. I want to give credit to the beauty of the tonalities, the seductive, almost erotic patina of the surfaces, the absolute accuracies of the compositions. Above all, I want to believe that all of these subjects knew what they were getting into. I want to, but I can’t.
Art critic Brenda Atkinson is the co-editor (with Candice Breitz) of Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art