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From mining entrepreneur to photographer, Roger Ballen is not typical. Yet, with a picture editor at Magnum for father and New York photo gallerist for mother, it is not inexplicable that he be imbued with an indelible photographic flair.
What is more confounding is the psychological depth that Ballen brings to his photos. With barely a human subject in sight, Ballen’s newest book, Boarding House, makes his oeuvre even more intangible. Flattened perspectives, doodle-like constructions of twine and wire, textured grime, modernist still-lifes, tribalist wall drawings, affected animals and truncated body parts… How do these abstractions impact so deeply? This sense of marvel is what keeps one paging through the book, over and over again.
Interestingly, as David Travis notes in the introduction, the “boarding house” is not imaginary. It is a real three-storey warehouse, crowded with workers, transients, criminals, witchdoctors and other subalterns, just outside Johannesburg. For the past four years, Ballen has collaboratively created the disarming fictions of his photos with the residents.
It is then the mystery of Ballen himself that is mesmerising. “We are reminded that with a camera, depiction is primarily a matter of simple optics from a chosen point of view and time, but with a photographer, it is a matter of perception, opinion and psychology,” writes Travis.
