Overview

With a career spanning over four decades, Roger Ballen is best known for his psychologically powerful and masterfully composed images that exist in a space between painting, drawing, installation and photography. This book is both a departure from his existing oeuvre and the culmination of his unique aesthetic linking image-making and theatrical performance. Separated into seven chapters or 'acts', these Ballenesque images take readers on a journey deep into their subconscious. Inspired by the sight of hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women's prison, Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then 'drawing on' or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The results are like prehistoric cave-paintings: the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen carves his thoughts and emotions. Fossil-like facial forms and dismembered body parts co-exist uncomfortably with vaporous, ghost-like shadows - these images have the capacity to shock, inspire, amuse and even elate viewers. Timeless and innovative, earthly and otherwordly, physical and spiritual, his work transcends all traditional concepts of photography.

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Reviews

Roger Ballen explores a new realm, carving out figures from black paint on glass to create cave-drawing abstractions, with the usual psychological twists. In chapters with titles ranging from 'Eros' to 'Melancholy, ' he probes dreamlike corners of the human psyche.

Roger Ballen explores a new realm, carving out figures from black paint on glass to create cave-drawing abstractions, with the usual psychological twists. In chapters with titles ranging from 'Eros' to 'Melancholy, ' he probes dreamlike corners of the human psyche. The visual Shakespeare of our time, with good measures of Freud and Jung tossed in, especially Jung!... [Ballen] knows the many parts we play externally in the drama of life, but also most especially the archetypal parts within each of us that are struggling and trying to assert themselves, as some of them may wish to be externalized; they hover, cower, act out the most secret of emotions, desires, fears, and drives, and translate them into potential actions in our everyday existence. The shadows know it all... In collaboration with Marguerite Rossouw, Ballen paints and draws these spirits on windows and other panes, then photographs the results, one-of-a-kind and ethereal as works of art, and short-lived except through the photographs and this book, a source of self-discovery and astonishment for those who dare.

'Highlights shadowed places in the human psyche and in the wider world. Recommended' - Fortean Times 'Reveals a surprising, macabre new direction for the photographer' - Creative Review 'Otherworldly' - CNN

Author Information

Roger Ballen is the recipient of numerous awards, including 'Photographer of the Year' at Rencontres d'Arles in 2002 and 'Photography Book of the Year' for Outland at Photo España in 2001.

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