In his new book of photographs, Boarding House (Phaidon), Roger Ballen moves further in the direction indicated by his previous volume, Shadow Chamber. Indeed, we are still in the shadow chamber of Ballen’s imagination — or unconscious.
Having started as a relatively conventional documentary photographer, the American-born Ballen found in South Africa’s small towns a dynamic that would take him increasingly further away from pure documentary, though an element of it still exists in these new photographs. Perhaps it was the background minutiae of those small-town environments, as much as the faces and bodies of his subjects, that led to what in Boarding House is a space in which background has become foreground, a space filled with detail yet largely denuded of the literal human presence.
That is, these are no longer portraits in the usual sense, or they are not portraits of people, or even of a ”real” space; they are portraits, as it were, of a mysterious internal world. As curator David Travis notes in his introduction, the photographer’s gaze has turned away from the external world to register something in his own mind. Yet, of course, photography being what it is, there has to be an external image of some kind to make a play of light and shadow on the film at all.
This is one of the paradoxes of Ballen’s work, and an indication of the complexity with which he uses the medium of photography. Yes, he is still taking pictures of something in the material world ”out there”, but he is manipulating it to do something other than just record a piece of the visible world. Rather these images become an analogue for the invisible world in our heads, or wherever the unconscious is located.
Using spaces similar to those he has photographed more realistically before, Ballen now adds what he calls ”fictional” elements, bringing these pictures closer to fine art. The visual references, if one needs them, are to l’art brut and Jean Dubuffet, the Surrealists, as well as to arte povera. I see Kurt Schwitters in them too, and Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages. I’m reminded of Rauschenberg’s famous pronouncement that his work took place in the space between art and life. It feels like Ballen’s undoubtedly artful photographs take place in a space somehow behind life.
In them, surfaces are assembled or juxtaposed, which may then be inscribed with rough figures. Found (or carefully selected?) objects become sculptural elements in a sort of tableau vivant, or, perhaps, closer to the French term for still life, nature morte. Certainly, there is a thematic tension here between life and death, between the living subject (the person in the frame, the photographer’s gaze) and objects traditionally deemed lifeless.
For the most part, the human hands, arms, eyes and other parts that appear seem detached from their bodies; they are often sculptural elements rather than simply pictures of people. Sometimes they (especially the eyes) are little eruptions into the passive material world. And the human presence is in fact registered all over these ostensibly lifeless surfaces: their very texture (and there is a lot of texture) speak of human use, of the ravages of time, of a space lived in long ago, perhaps in dreams.
The images are undoubtedly disturbing, in the way a bad or ambiguous dream is disturbing, or in the way death and decay are naturally disturbing. They are disturbing, too, in the way that they resist simple, clear interpretation; there is no join-the-dots reading to be done of them. But they are also beautiful, and their beauty is inextricable from their disturbing qualities — from their disturbance, you might say. In delicate, high-definition black-and-white, they record the textures and shapes of space that is somehow both visible and invisible. Boarding House is photography as a disturbance of light.
Roger Ballen’s work shows at the Durban Art Gallery from June 3 to July 21 and at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery from July 29 to August 22, as well as at the Pretoria Library in September and October and at Erdmann Contemporary in Cape Town from February 2010