The Manchester Art Gallery opens its doors to the first major solo exhibition in a public UK gallery of internationally renowned photographer Roger Ballen. The exhibition explores three decades of the photographer’s career and not only demonstrates his influence on contemporary photography, but also the development of his unique photographic style.
Elusive but precise, incongruent but harmonious, and undoubtedly challenging; no photographic, or even artistic, style or category quite describes Ballen’s captivating, complex, and at times unsettling, photographs. Born in New York in 1950, Ballen has lived and worked in South Africa for more than 30 years, and during this time he has produced multiple series, which have evolved from straightforward photojournalistic approach to his very own artistic vision.
His early work, produced from the early 1980s to the mid 90s, focuses on the white population living in the hinterland; the margins of South African society. With these penetrating, socially critical photographs exploring his subjects’ daily lives and environment, Ballen gained world recognition. These early photographs already possess his distinctive black and white, square format aesthetic, but his style gradually moved away from photojournalism and evolved into what Ballen himself describes as, ‘documentary fiction’. The line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred and although Ballen’s photographs have a spontaneous appearance, they have been staged for the camera. He employs recurring props and themes such as dirty feet and shadows, and people increasingly give way to animals – the assortment of people, animals and objects might at first seem random, upon closer inspection the viewer recognizes Ballen’s ability to bring the interrelationship between them to light.
Ballen’s photographs dance between despair and trust as well as cruelty and compression, confronting the viewer with things he adores and things he fears. The powerful and intriguing combination of uncanny beauty, an intense oddness as well as a brutal rawness, create a strange limbo, paralysing the viewer with uncertainty about what is funny or childish and what is horrific or grown-up. Nothing in his work is straightforward, but I suggest that maybe we don’t need to know what is real and what is not – Roger Ballen’s work certainly affects the viewer.
Ballen’s work can be found in numerous books,and has previously been shown in established art institutions throughout the world he is present in many Museum Collections. Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983 – 2011 is an exhibition that brings the viewer up close to Ballen’s intensely personal, startling and confrontational photographs, which challenge our assumptions about the medium.
Anna-Maria Pfab
Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983 – 2011
Through 13 May 2012
Manchester Art Gallery
Mosley Street
Manchester M2 3JL
