American born Roger Ballen had an early and unlikely exposure to photography, being raised in suburban New York, he was fortunate in that his mother was working with the Magnum photo agency in the ’60s, which lead to him becoming acquainted with the likes of Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt and the co-founder of Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

His work spans five decades and for a long time wasn’t his primary professional focus, working instead as a Geologist in South Africa. He describes photography as having been a hobby for many years, creating less pressure around monetising the work, allowing him to develop his style slowly and with consideration. His haunting, recognisable style found its way into a much celebrated video collaboration with South African music duo Die Antwoord gaining almost 200 million views.

His contribution to the South African art scene has been significant, opening the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg in 2023, in which exhibitions, talks and educational programs take place around African art themes.

 

"When I was young, the height of being a photographer was being on the street. Being around events that were happening, riots, earthquakes or whatever. The Magnum agency was at the peak of this, for whom my mother worked in America. But the importance laid with being there in a real world situation, wrestling the forces of humanity through a camera, but this is no longer the way people interpret the world, it’s all in virtual reality. It has a much different impact on the human mind than a physical experience. You can talk about the nice smelling flower, but there’s nothing like smelling the flower."

 

"Back when I was young, in 1974 I hitchhiked from Cairo to Cape Town, it was a nine month to a year long trip, and it took me nine months to find a phone that worked. On August 23rd 1974 after crossing Africa, I finally found a phone that worked on my fathers birthday and called him from the Salisbury Rhodesia post office. These days you can’t get rid of the things, it’s become an appendage. It’s a different reality, and where that leads I cannot say, I’m not trying to make value judgements because I don’t know what’s right or wrong for anybody, but all I can say is that I’m very pleased I had two experiences living in two very different worlds."

"I received a degree in psychology and then my PhD is in Geology, so I did geological work in Africa for 25 or 30 years, that’s how I kept going with photography. I never got into commercial photography, it’s not my thing at all and I don’t think I would even do a good job of it. I’ve found that the best way to promote photographic projects is through videos, as seemingly people remember short clips of 10 seconds than they do seeing just another photograph on Instagram. I have a museum in Africa for photography, and the only frequent method we have to attract attendees is by paying Facebook in Palo Alto, California to alert the public of the events. It’s crazy, there’s no alternative."



"My mother working with Magnum played a large role in my getting into photography, there were three or four photographers in those days that I became obsessed with, lasting until about the age of 22, but that created the groundwork for everything I did. Kertez taught me about art, because nobody thought about photography as art-form in those days, Elliott Erwit taught me about humour and my pictures have a lot of absurdity, Paul Strand taught me about composition and Cartier Bresson taught me about the decisive moment. By the time I was 19 I could take pictures. If my mother hadn’t have done this, I could have easily ended up a Lawyer just like my father. The likelihood of someone like me in suburban America getting involved in photography all by myself is slim to none, it just wouldn’t happen."

"For the past five decades I shoot five days or more a week, it’s like an athlete, you can’t expect to become a great golfer without practicing, you learn from the pictures. You can run from museum to museum to museum but it’s of little help to the practical side, it might be interesting of course, but you need to shoot. From the late ‘60s to ’94 I was still shooting documentary, it wasn’t a uniquely Ballenesque by any means, but around ’97 I took a step to interacting with the subject in my own absurd way. I wanted to create a visual reality that was mine, with the subject matter."

"I made what has become a well known book called ‘Outlander’ published by Phaidon in 2000, which nearly every picture has a person in it, but towards the end there are some drawings which are from some visits to houses in the countryside where the kids had drawn all over the walls. I thought this was genius, so the idea for the drawing element to my work doesn’t come from visiting a Lucian Freud exhibition, it comes from being in houses where the kids had drawn on the walls. I started to integrate drawing into my work after this but this is the result of two things, I was obsessed with painting in the early ‘70s and spent about 5 or 6 months painting everyday, so in my mind I hadn’t finished what I wanted to do."

"I didn’t know how to link drawing to photography, it took me until about 2002 to bring those things together, it was a very slow process, it wasn’t a sudden moment, it was certain pieces from different series’ that some worked, some less."

"My decision to be in South Africa wasn’t connected to photography, it was really still just a hobby to me along side my career path. It was a hobby until about 2000, as I just couldn’t make a living out of it. There was no market for photography, still even now, because I didn’t want to do commercial work, it’s far away from the whole world, they had sanctions there. I would have had to quit photography if I had tried to make a career out of it at the time. I had to do something parallel and it turned out to be a good decision because it didn’t interfere with what I was doing. I find geology and nature inspiring, I don’t need anything man-made to get inspired, I can just look at rocks. I’d rather look at a rock than a Gucci bag, it’s a billion years old. Where was the state of the planet at that point, how did it get there. A Gucci bag can’t inspire any of these questions."

"Up until 2016, all of my pictures were shot on film, 6x6 medium format black and white film. I like 6x6 for two reasons, compared to say a 35mm, that’s why I bought the 6x6 Rollei camera. Number one, you have a lot more resolution because the negative is significantly larger and secondly because I like the square, as it’s a perfect form, whereas a rectangle isn’t. everything is equal in the image, everything has an equal and organic visual aesthetic. Nothing is more important to my images than perfect form and complex meaning. A lot of people have trouble with the square, it’s not easy, but it feels very natural to me. I’ve been doing it so long it should feel natural anyway; one would hope."


"When a machine is seen to be doing the heavy lifting in the creation of an artwork, using something like a camera which records reality versus transforming it, people are sceptical. An audience is not necessarily visually inclined enough to reasonably determine what is and isn’t art. With a lot of photography I’ve seen, I don’t understand why a lot of it would be labelled as art. I’m not even sure what the word means, it’s such a personal definition on one hand, but on the other, the term belongs in the garbage can; there’s no meaning in the word. Almost anyone is capable of composing a long treatise justifying the meaning of something insignificant as art."

"I think photography is going through a crisis of sorts now that everyone ‘can’ do it. When I started 25 years ago, you needed technical skills - no one even had a camera, and now everyone stands with a camera in front of their faces. And now you have Ai coming in which is making it even more confusing as to where we are going."



"After shooting almost exclusively in black and white for fifty years, I turned to color photography in 2016. In September 2025 Thames and Hudson will be publishing a book of my color images taken over the past 8 years, allowing the viewer to engage with new and lesser-known aspects of my artistic practice, while expanding the Ballenesque aesthetic. These color photographs, often deploying mannequins, masks, artificial body parts and live animals in carefully choreographed yet mysterious spaces, surreal and absurd story lines, will likely transform the viewer's state of mind."

 

 

Portraits shot on Mamiya RZ67 PRO II / 110mm f2.8 and Leica R8 / 80mm f1.4. All artworks copyright Roger Ballen. 

To see more of Roger's artwork, please click here.