In 1999, I was a peon at a photography organization, charged with
running the slide projector at the meetings where artists were selected
for exhibition. In one unforgettable session, after clicking through
hundreds of uninspired transparencies, an image of two drooling idiots
appeared on the screen. Twins, the brutes with elephantine ears faced
the camera warily, arms crossed, evidently unaware of the thick ropes
of saliva hanging from their open mouths. It was a searing image that
recalled the best works of Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon’s In the
American West, but each piece we saw after that was more theatrical
and inexplicable than the previous: grinning men with wire cages over
their heads; emaciated drifters crouching behind couches; children
biting themselves; fetal puppies cradled between dirty feet. They were
disturbing, purgatorial visions by Roger Ballen, a South African
photographer who was then still relatively unknown. The members of the
exhibition committee were stunned by the photographs’ visceral power,
but the conversation was soon dominated by a discussion of
“exploitation,” and the work was passed over for exhibition.
In the years since, I’ve learned that it’s difficult to have a
conversation about Ballen without invoking the issue of exploitation,
even though the artist photographs fewer and fewer people these days.
This Wednesday, May 7, the 58-year-old artist will speak at a Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art-sponsored event, and Portlanders can
witness 20 of Ballen’s career-spanning prints—including several
that are making their US debut—at Quality Pictures through June
28. While Ballen’s portrayal of disenfranchised, rural Afrikaners will
surely generate conversations that toe the line of ethics and political
correctness, to focus on the issue of exploitation is to miss the
greater 90 percent of his brilliance.
When the New York-born geologist landed in South Africa nearly 30
years ago, mineral exploration took him to “nearly every small town and
village in South Africa.” Initially photographing the ramshackle shacks
that marked the rural countryside, Ballen eventually began to make
portraits of the people he met—many of whom lived in abject
poverty and appeared deranged before Ballen’s camera. These became the
iconic, controversial portraits for which he’s still best known,
although few people discuss the work’s roots in the politics of
apartheid, which was being disassembled as Ballen photographed his way
across the country. These subjects, Ballen says, “were faced with
revolution, fear, alienation, isolation, and rejection. The way these
people were photographed, in my mind, was a metaphor for what a lot of
people were feeling. They were feeling unsettled, alienated, and not
able to cope in all sorts of ways.”
That people rarely speak of this seemingly critical aspect only
belies the tenuous relationship Ballen’s photography has with empirical
reportage. The reason his early portraits have survived in the popular
imagination is that they transcend politics and tap into far deeper
veins of the human condition. All of Ballen’s images, from the early
portraits to the newer scenes of hieroglyphics, rats, and bucket fires,
are grimy visions of power, chaos, formal precision, disconnectedness,
and physicality.
Motivated by the psychological unrest the images provoked, Ballen
grew more theatrical in his portraits, introducing props and animals
into the mysterious, Beckett-like psychodramas. Gradually, the human
presence began to disappear from Ballen’s photographs—just an
outstretched hand here, a pair of dangling feet there—and
child-like wall drawings began to pop up, almost as if surrogates for
the people who once dominated his images.
“One thing I [was] trying to define,” Ballen says of his shift away
from portraiture, “was, ‘Is chaos fundamental to the world around us,
or is order?'” This isn’t the type of question that most photographers
I know set out to answer, and it’s the kind of critical inquiry that’s
thwarted when audiences have reactionary judgments about the
exploitation issue. In the countless hours I’ve spent considering
Ballen’s work since that first committee meeting, I’ve had to resign
myself to the fact that no amount of mental gymnastics could extinguish
my belief that his early works were somewhat exploitative (a charge I
do not hold to any of his later work). But that hardly nullifies the
shockwaves of raw theatricality that emanate from his photographs, and
the silent argument they engaged within me provided fodder for
invaluable stretches of self-examination. Wrestling with the grotesque
is not a hazard of dealing with Ballen’s images—it’s the point of
it. Roger Ballen has crafted a visionary collision of order and chaos
that makes him one of the most important photographers alive; to deny
the complexity of his photographs is to sidestep their reverberating
power.