Roger Ballen: Shadow Chamber

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Since the late 1990s, Roger Ballen's work has moved away from the category of documentary photography into the realms of fiction. Though he continued to portray people on the fringes of South African society, his subjects began to act out dark and discomfiting tableaux, providing images that are exciting and disturbing but also contain flashes of dark humour. Ballen's most recent images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photography. There is no digital imaging involved: everything shown happened in front of the camera. The images are completely honest, and yet they are also fabricated. In Shadow Chamber, Ballen focuses on the interactions between the people, animals and objects that inhabit his unique image space. The rooms he photographs are actual places that we know exist, but they are unsettling and strange, logical but utterly impossible: their walls are covered with scribbled drawings, stainsand dangling wires, the floors are strewn with bizarre props and artefacts. Dogs, rabbits and kittens wander into the frame or are stuffed into unlikely containers. In one picture, a boy holds up a paper bag with a drawing of a bird on its side and a dead chicken hanging from the bag's bottom. Figures hide away in boxes, crouch behind overstuffed sofas and squat with their shirts pulled over their heads. The humans and animals in Ballen's photographs appear isolated, estranged and lost, yet strangely empowered at the same time. The resulting images are allegories of lived experiences as well as surreal takes on human destiny. As Robert A Sobieszek writes in his introduction to Shadow Chamber: 'To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may not be only futile but missing the point.' In 2002, Ballen was named Photographer of the Year by Rencontres d'Arles. His work is included in many important private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Johannesburg Art Museum, South Africa; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.