Roger Ballen (born April 11, 1950) is an American artist living in Johannesburg, South Africa, and working in its surrounds since the 1970s. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Marginalized people, animals, found objects, wires and childlike drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Ballen's artworks. Ballen describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.
Biography
Ballen was born in New York City to Irving Ballen and Adrienne Ballen (née Miller), and was raised as Jewish. His father was an attorney and the founding partner of McLaughlin, Stern. His mother was a member of the famous photo agency Magnum from 1963 to 1967 prior to opening the Photography House Gallery with Inge Bondi in New York City in 1968. Ballen became acquainted with the photographs of Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson either from published photographs in albums or through personal acquaintance. He attended Scarborough School, New York, and went to Camp Stinson during his childhood summers. At age 13, he received his first camera, and was soon after employed for a first commercial job of photographing McDonald's, Mamaroneck, New York. Ballen was interested in the realism of Rembrandt from a young age, and was drawn to photographing elderly men. He recalls that one of the most "vivid and pivotal moment[s] in his life occurred in 1968 when [his] parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera for [his] high school graduation. On the very same day [he] went to the outskirts of Sing Sing Prison near New York city to take photographs".
He later studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, which was an epicenter for the 1960s counter-culture. Here, he was exposed to R. D. Laing's anti-psychiatry movement, Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious", the Theatre of the Absurd (Pinter, Beckett and Ionesco) and existential philosophers, such as Sartre and Heidegger, all of which came to be formative in the development of his artistic style. During the summer of 1969, he photographed Woodstock, a series which was published in the New York Times 50th anniversary of the iconic music festival. Ballen notes that capturing Woodstock "played a role in [his] getting to know the human experience, human endeavour, finding the moment, working with people, searching in difficult circumstances for something that stood out. If I had to say what are important aspects that run through the work, it's trying to come to terms with pure chaos." Ballen made his first film Ill Wind after completing a course in film making in 1972.
After the death of his mother Adrienne in 1973, he, like many of the counter-culture, developed existential longing in response aversion to the materialism of Western society and his suburban upbringing. He spent the subsequent five months Art Students of League of New York. Here, he painted art brut, primitivist, paintings, that according to his teacher, "belonged in the Stone Age". In the autumn of 1973, yearning to find Conrad's "heart of darkness" and Eastern nirvana, he left embarked on a five-year journey, that would take him by land from Cairo to Cape Town; Istanbul to New Guinea (1973-1978). On this trip, he continued an ongoing interest in taking pictures of enigmatic men against dramatic surfaces of shrines, temples and markets. He also began a series of 'field photographs' of streets, earthen paths or walls (inspired by the colour field painting movement) and developed an interest in observing the life of young boys. He kept Kodak Tri-X or Plus X film a green canvas knapsack which he would tie to his legs during meals or overnight train rides or tied to hotel bedposts. He processed the film and would send it to his father in New York.