There’s a story about William Faulkner and his apparently chaotic novel The Sound and the Fury. He was asked, “What does it mean?” To which Faulkner replied, “If I knew what it meant, I wouldn’t have had to write it.”
Something of this applies to the photographs of Roger Ballen, whose images persistently goad viewers to ask of him: “What does it mean?”
They are driven to ask this because the photographs are complex, mysterious, disturbing. It is hard to know whether they are staged, and to what degree; they do not send clear signals about their meanings, their intentions or the relationship of photographer to subject. Rather than transmitting one particular message, they are visual spaces in which meaning is a play of possibilities. And that’s the way Ballen likes it.
“A good picture,” he says, “has to stand on its own and almost be organic. It has a life beyond you; it’s a living thing.”
Born in 1950, Ballen is an American who has worked in South Africa for about 30 years as a geologist. He grew up in New York, where his mother ran a Magnum photo agency, so photography was in the air he breathed. He knew greats such as Arthur Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Still, it is at first surprising that, within a few minutes of my meeting him, Ballen quotes Cartier-Bresson’s dictum about the importance of “the decisive moment” in photography.
Cartier-Bresson was, famously, one of those photographers who aimed to capture a fleeting moment — to seize a tiny instant from the ceaseless flux of life. He helped develop a camera that could take such pictures on the hoof, that was extremely mobile and could use natural light, and he wandered the streets searching for that elusive moment. Among his most well-known images is one of a man jumping over a puddle: the leg outstretched, its reflection caught in the water below, the photograph is a snap of frozen time and a perfect example of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”.
Yet Ballen’s recent images seem to be the very opposite kind of picture. His earlier works, collected in the books Dorps (1986) and Platteland (1994), were documentary in style, reflecting the people and textures of small-town South African life. His latest work, particularly the pictures collected in his new exhibition and book, Shadow Chamber, are more enigmatic: the scenarios presented are not simply “found” in the world out there and then “captured” in the photo. Intensely formal, they are more like paintings or drawings, and they raise intriguing questions about finding or fabricating images.
“There’s definitely a progression in the work, from being documentary to being a more complex statement,” says Ballen. “The main issues in Dorps and Platteland, the questions I was asking myself, related to South African culture. Platteland was trying to document a group of isolated, marginalised people in the South African countryside. There was documentation, but I was trying to find archetypes and make statements about the human condition. People were very disturbed by it, so maybe there was truth in there.
“I’ve always said I’m not a political-social photographer and I wasn’t making political statements about the white population in South Africa; my goal was always to make more universal statements about the human condition and the nature of photography. With Dorps I found these places, and I found a psychological space I’ve never really left.”
After Platteland, he says, and working toward his next book, Outland (2001), “I started to experiment, to find a style that suited my mental state. In about 1997/98, there started to be a distinct change in the work, with the subjects involved in some form of theatre. The work started to expand beyond the issues of this particular culture, and to find something that was much more abstract.”
The photographs of Dorps and Platteland engendered controversy because it looked like Ballen had deliberately sought out the freakish — the inbred, ugly face of poor-white South Africa. With Outland and now Shadow Chamber, he has continued working with many of those same people, in many of the same environments, but they are no longer simply a sight encountered in the world out there and recorded by the photographer; they have become players in Ballen’s drama of consciousness, actors in his internal shadow chamber. “They were brought into another realm, and that realm was my psyche.”
Yet the images are still disturbing — perhaps even more so, because the viewer is unable to determine what elements in them have been staged. As Ballen himself says, “It’s not really clear in these pictures who these people are, why they are doing what they’re doing. Did I tell them to do this? What’s them, what’s me?
“That tendency has become more defined in Shadow Chamber. The most common question I’ve been asked about Shadow Chamber is: ‘Is this a real place or is it just your imagination?’ Well, there’s a famous Houdini quote that a magician never tells you his tricks.”
Ballen says he’s happy to discuss any element of the pictures, except what they mean. “These pictures are mixtures of all sorts of things going on,” he says. Any such image is “a complex interaction” — not just the interaction of photographer and subject, but that of viewer and picture.
“It’s not only staged versus non-staged,” says Ballen. “It’s dark versus light, sanity versus insanity, comedy versus tragedy — pictures contain opposites that are part of their very nature. The more we look at the confusion, the more we consider the confusion — the confusion that is human existence itself. I can’t verbalise a lot of this, because of lot of what I do is non-verbal. The visual can’t necessarily be described verbally. Somebody asked me the other day, ‘Do you take pictures of your dreams?’ I said, ‘The space I’m trying to define is the space the dreams come from.'”
The shadow chamber is the subconscious. Ballen mentions Carl Jung, the psychologist for whom “the Shadow” was a projection of all the dark, scary, incomprehensibe stuff we have within us, but that we don’t want to acknowledge in the social, daylit realm of the ego. So we try to externalise it, project it on to an imaginary Shadow figure. Because Ballen’s pictures venture into and attempt to picture the world of the Shadow, they generate anxiety in viewers.
“I’m asked all the time, ‘What does this picture mean?’ The one thing I really, honestly don’t know is the meaning of the works. They are a reflection of my state of mind, my consciousness. What do you say about yourself? Basically the question is, ‘Who are you?’ I’ve never had a one-word answer. I’m hoping the pictures go into the belly of the human condition.”
The images in Shadow Chamber are suspended in a mysterious space between the found and the constructed; even if you presume they are completely staged, they surprise you. Hence his use of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”: that moment exists not only outside the photographer, in the world, at the instant the man jumps over the puddle, for instance, but also in the photographer’s mind, eye and body. It’s in the way he holds and tilts the camera (Ballen uses a heavy Rollex, without tripod). It’s in the moment he decides to release the shutter.
Look at the photograph entitled Loner. Above a male figure lying on a bed, his body turned away from the viewer, is a kind of home-made fetish: a crucified doll mimics Jesus in extremis, and is helpfully labelled “God”. All of this could have been staged carefully by Ballen (despite his openness, he is still a little cagey about exactly what he has set up in his pictures, about what instructions he has issued to his models). But what really catches and holds the eye as it moves over the image is not so much the doll as the dog — the way its melancholy gaze looks back at the viewer. There, in that detail, is the decisive moment. Even if you assume that it is all staged, rather than simply found “out there”, somewhere in the platteland, even if you imagine that Ballen made the doll crucifix himself, it is the unstaged dog’s gaze that seizes you.
The richness of Ballen’s photographs derives precisely from this indeterminacy, from the way they raise questions rather than answer them: “When I was younger, I thought I had answers. But, during the last three books, I was trying to ask questions. Now I don’t even have the questions. I’m trying to find the questions.”
The Shadow Chamber exhibition opens at the Everard Read Gallery, 6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg, on March 2. The book is published by Phaidon.