Roger Ballen: Shadow Land

Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983-2001 | Manchester Art Gallery | until 13th May

Manchester Art Gallery has unveiled a retrospective of New York-born, Johannesburg-based photographer Roger Ballen’s striking monochrome images in a solo exhibition running until 13th May. Moving to South Africa in the 1970′s, Ballen has described his career in photography as “fundamentally a psychological and existential journey” spending his career to date looking to define himself through the images.

Often photographing those living on the fringes of society, Ballen’s square black and white pictures have a gritty reality about them but through their composition appear somewhat abstract in their strange beauty. His work during the last few decades has seen him become critically acclaimed, with series such as ‘Platteland’, ‘Shadow Chamber‘ and ‘Boarding House’ cementing his place as one of the most important figures in contemporary photography .

Unseen work from his latest project ‘Asylum’ is on display at this, Ballen’s first solo show at a British public gallery  with recent work, seeing an evolution into style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’ in which the line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. Through this approach, his work has entered into a new realm of photography, one that becomes even more surreal than some of his oddest finds during earlier projects.

Still developing and toying with his approach to image making today, a recent and particularly odd collaboration has seen him direct the new video

for self-proclaimed ‘zef’ (that’s the genre apparently) group Die Antwoord after the ‘band’ admitted that he was a chief inspiration to them. Aesthetically, the tones and the compositions in the video are unmistakably Ballen’s work. The sound accompanying them however, is sufficiently off-putting for me to instead, embed a nice VHS-recorded South Bank Show (complete with a suitably fresh looking Melvyn Bragg) feature on Ballen from 1995 instead.

The exhibition is free, with contributions encouraged with information on opening times and directions available at the Manchester Art Gallery’s website

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