Roger Ballen

Born in New York 1950, Roger Ballen has been based in Johannesburg, South Africa since the early 1980s. He studied psychology at the University of California, and later his PhD at the Colorado School of Mines. Ballen was originally drawn to South Africa to work as a geologist, but his enthusiasm for photography strengthened, and he has been taking images there for more than thirty years.
 
Ballen's first venture into photography during his college years was primarily politically and socially oriented, with a photojournalistic angle. This outlook continued into his preliminary works taken in South Africa, as seen in his book Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994). With an empathetic and journalistic attitude, Ballen portrayed white people living on the margins of society in remote rural towns. These striking works broke a lot of taboos and were met with hesitance by the public.
 
He later found himself immersed in a community who occupied a three-storey warehouse in Johannesburg. Inhabited by those on the fringes of society - poor workers, witchdoctors, criminals, isolated individuals and animals - Ballen built a rapport during his frequent, often daily visits, and was able to photograph and record their conditions. These powerful images were published in subsequent books Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2009) and Asylum (2011). 
 
Through his work Ballen has created a unique aesthetic commonly referred to as the Ballenesque. The artist's works are often considered to be psychological and challenge the viewer's consciousness. The definitions of art and documentary are blurred and reveal a playful, absurd sense of comedy. One consistency is his noted interest in lines - whether railings, wires walls or corners which can be seen in element throughout.
  
In 2023 Ballen opened the Inside Out Centre for Arts in Johannesburg, providing an educational facility but also an active art studio space to the South African capital. The concrete building conveys Ballen’s particular aesthetic and pursuing a local approach, the centre both shows and produces work with the local community. In 2025, Ballen opened an additional centre, specifically for photography, which seeks to spark public engagement through the image. 
 
Ballen has extensively exhibited worldwide and his work is represented globally in major museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013 the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution presented a major retrospective of his work, to critical acclaim. Ballen represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale in 2022 with his photographic work The Theatre of Apparitions – on that same year Thames and Hudson published a second volume of Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective.