Fact or Fiction, Roger Ballen
by Sean O'Toole
One often wonders what appetite Roger Ballen's images satisfy in Northern audiences, in the galleries of New York and Paris and elsewhere. Do they authenticate an abject sense of life in the periphery? Do they intrigue or repel? Do people laugh? How do the images dialogue with the glossy image of a first class holiday to Cape Town punted by South Africa's massive tourist effort abroad? These are complex questions, ones that begin to nest the idea of Ballen's importance as a photographer.
Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition earlier this year, at the Kamel Mennour Gallery in Paris, Fact or Fiction, Roger Ballen is a compendium of familiar works from his recent Outland series of photographs. Compared to the almost Arbusian quality of his older Dorps and Platteland studies, Outland offered viewers an impressionistic series of studies of Ballen's familiar down-and-out subjects.
The ambivalence of his motive still angers many people I speak with locally, so it was with great interest that I approached Stephane Guiborge's short essay. For one thing I was looking forward to reading what an intelligent Northerner had to say about Ballen's images, hoping that the writing would answer those questions I raised earlier.
"This isn't journalism," Guiborge states early on, "no specific event is being related. And this isn't simply an aesthetically pleasing work either - these pictures wouldn't look nice hanging in your living room." Guiborge further discounts anthropology and ethnology from the list, stating: "It's something else."
"It is, in its absence," she clarifies, "in its roundabout way, the simplest expression of the human soul, when nothing else is left� Emptiness as unique, emptiness as final d�cor." Having quite an affinity for French thought and modes of expression I must admit to being quite taken by this insight, that Ballen's images portray an unadorned existential terror.
Guiborge further clarifies her argument by stating that this terror is grounded in real life circumstances, in the basic lack which defines South African life: "Lack of education, lack of love, lack of bearings, of future, hope and horizon. Lack of compassion." In Guiborge's eyes Ballen has written a sombre elegy to the "lack of". This is a challenging statement, one that I think is convincingly argued too by JM Coetzee in Disgrace. But Guiborge's statement leaves me unsure - not wholly convinced.
Complemented by an interview with the photographer, which was conducted by Guiborge, Fact or Fiction, Roger Ballen is a no doubt a necessary addition to the collector's archive. That it duplicates what has been published before will obviously lesson its broad appeal, but sometimes it is the words that appendage themselves to photographic images that make exhibition catalogues such as this worth having.
Fact or Fiction, Roger Ballen, Hardcover
Publisher: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 2003
ISBN: None
Price: Available upon request from www.galeriemennour.com
