Photo-artist Roger Ballen creates black-and-white photographs that are dark, enigmatic and a vegan’s nightmare. Ornella D'Souza talks to the 66-year-old about his style and process
Scribbles in chalk on walls, desolate living spaces, unstable ghoulish figures, enlarged genitalia, birds butchered or voodoo-worshipped or set free, eerie background score… A Roger Ballen image almost always incites bouts of the jitters. Exactly the reaction the 66-year-old South Africa based American artist, who’s been making black-and-white photographs for 50 years, is looking for.
“You can wake up tomorrow with a brain tumour so as much as we deny it, we’re all living on the edge,” says the artist who is exhibiting 35 photographs from his previous Thames & Hudson publications Theatre of Apparitions and Asylum of Birds at Goa’s Sunaparanta Art Gallery.
Strange, enigmatic, metaphoric, mysterious, imaginative, poetic, magical, surreal and dreamlike are words Ballen uses to describe his ‘Ballen-esque’ style. “I’m a ‘psychological’ artist who’s not interested in making political comments. I aim to help one part of the mind talk to the other part. I see myself dealing with more universal issues of the human condition. I also like psychologically edgy places. Like the house in Asylum of Birds was an unstable place. It showed a lot of people who were violent criminals. That was a place on the edge, a project I worked on for five years.”
Point to him that his works can disturb and their multiple connotations can confuse, and he says, “They could be all of those things and then none of them. They can also be spiritual, inspiring and challenging. As an artist, I don’t try to define or put words to pictures.”
Marguerite Rossouw
He adds that his works bring him catharsis and are psychologically autobiographical. “It’s like writing a diary to better understand Roger Ballen. It’s a journey through myself, my mind, into my core.”
Ballen says he belongs to the last generation of 60s photographers who made black-and-white images. Traditional photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson influenced his formative style. “I like black-and-white (photography), which is reduced, much more barren, much more of an abstract art form that has no pretence.”
Ballen’s also no stranger to India. In 1973, he was here to take abstract pictures for his first book Boyhood about rediscovering his childhood through travels. A decade later, art photography penetrated his original documentary style, a union that culminated in his first hit, the 1986 publication Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa about the culture and architecture that was ‘Old Africa’ fast disappearing. By early 90s, the Ballen-esque started developing. “I was revealing aesthetics no one else was doing. By 2002, portraiture completely disappeared from my works and got replaced by the drawings, paintings and installations you see now.”
Diehard fans of his work include the rap-rave group Die Antwoord who urged Ballen to infuse his imagery in their 2012 I Finky U Freak music video. The video got 90 million hits and counting.
A series on rats and a Thames & Hudson 350-page retrospective in 2017 are in the pipeline.
Asked about featuring animals in his works, he says, “The crossover between human and animal psyche helps me to better understand humanity. After all, in a way, we’re all animals.”
(On till December 8 at Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, Goa)
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