Hope my pictures will enter people's mind and help the repressed part, says photographer Roger Ballen

Every great photographer has a seminal image that presents the hallmarks of his style. For Roger Ballen, that iconic image would be Puppy between feet, a still-life in black-and-white of a closed-eyed newborn puppy, held up by a disembodied hand in between two large, scruffy, calloused feet. Grotesque is the word that comes to mind as you look at the image, yet it is also strangely beautiful and compelling, inviting you to wonder — what place is this, who is the man with the deformed, blackened toes, how did this peculiar arrangement of object, texture, light and shadow come about, and what does it mean?

Most of Ballen's works, on view until January at New Delhi's PhotoInk gallery, evoke a similar reaction — a sense of unease, akin to the feeling of disquiet on waking up from an unpleasant dream. This is Ballen's first exhibition in India and his first trip in 43 years — he was here last in 1973 as part of a five-year-long hitchhiking trip from Istanbul to New Guinea.

Ballen, an American by birth who has lived in South Africa since 1982, is often described as "one of the most important photographic artists of the 21st century". The PhotoInk show has around 40 photographs from Ballen's well-known Outland, Shadow Chamber and Asylum of the Birds series.

His photographs are not documentary in nature; they do not capture, or reflect "fleeting reality". What Ballen does is "stage" his photographs, that is, he carefully arranges all that you see in them to get the effect he wants. It's a strange mise-en-scene that Ballen puts together – a world that's weird, nightmarish even.

There are weird-looking men who look like degenerate tramps posing inside a shabby room in a poor house somewhere, which has strange doodles on the walls, and electric wires and bent coat-hangers drawing weird shapes on walls. "Everything has a physicality about it," says Ballen, "and brings with it a different metaphoric quality."

Several photographs feature animals – often a cat, dog or rat that's either dead, inside a glass cage, or held up by the tail, though you sometimes see a pig, doves, chicken or just their decapitated heads. "I'm very interested in animals," he says, "in how a basic part of the human mind links to the animal mind. We don't want to see ourselves as animals. [That's why] Western society tries to make nature into a little kitten."

However, strange they may appear, the places Ballen photographs are also "real" ones, often rundown slums on the outskirts of cities where poor, lower-middle South Africa, both white and black, lives. Ballen seems to spend a lot of time in these parts and knows them well. Asylum of Birds, for instance, his recent series, was shot over five years at a house in Johannesburg where people and animals live together. "The man who runs it likes the animals and the people there have nowhere to go, so he provides them food and shelter. It's not like a religious charity. They have to pay him."

Ballen, who's known him since 2002-03, says he's white, quiet and very strong. "When he was younger, he was a boxer or something and people are scared of him. If you work in a place like this, you have to become friends with him. It's like being in a gang, you have to get along with the leader."

The political, social or economic reality of post-Apartheid South Africa is not Ballen's interest. Instead it's "the politics of the mind", a theory proposed by psychiatrist RD Laing that Ballen first read as a student at the University of Berkeley, California. "My pictures, I am hopeful, will enter people's mind and help one part of it, the repressed part of it, talk to and begin some kind of reconciliation with that part of the consciousness that represses it, and keeps them from knowing their inherent self in a more profound way."