In conversation with Roger Ballen
by Sean O'Toole
Often viewed as an outsider figure within the South African art community, Roger Ballen has nonetheless consistently kept producing photographs that unsettle, disturb, provoke and taunt the senses. While his earlier work is redolent of the classicism of Walker Evans, his more recent work is less easy to categorise. Certainly the photographer's interest in the textured beauty of walls suggests Brassai, but this is only an incidental observation. As the photographer himself explains, his images are existential inquisitions into terror.
I would like to start by referring not to your own work but that of Diane Arbus. In certain respects there is a sense continuity between your images from Dorps and Platteland, and her studies of outsiders in the United States. What are your own, personal thoughts on Arbus?
I like Diane Arbus. I respect her as a photographer and artist. Certainly it is not a demotion of my own work to try compare mine with hers. Perhaps there are some obvious contextual relationships between my work and that of Diane Arbus. Firstly, we both deal with people on the fringe, people on the outside, people that have difficulty fitting in. I think that is where the similarities lie. We document a similar aspect of society that exists everywhere. So, ultimately, we are both dealing with archetypes.
Interestingly enough there is a new book by Diane Arbus. Many of the issues that were contested when she first produced her work are hardly even mentioned in the new book. She is seen more as an artist, as a person of substance. All those peripheral issues about exploitation have started to fall by the wayside, which I think is the right way to look at it. The critic and the viewer of the photograph will never really know what her relationship was with the people she photographed. Those issues are also actually immaterial, and in 100 years they'll become even more immaterial.
What really is left ultimately is the shell of the photograph, the meaning of the image. All these other issues that circle around it become unimportant. They key thing is the meaning of the image. I think that is what has happened to her work. While people still find that her images get under the skin, they tend now to deal with it in a more mature way.
I think this is gradually happening with my own work here in South Africa. When I produced Platteland in 1994, there was an uproar. The book disturbed people, and I was accused of everything from exploitation to being a foreigner trying to cause trouble here. I think in a lot of cases the people who made those accusations were ultimately being defensive, and in many ways exhibiting a very immature way of looking at art.
It is quite interesting that as time has progressed those accusations � which Diane Arbus also got � are voiced less and less. People are seeing the images in a historical context, or possibly an aesthetic context. People are also seeing some of the humour that is involved in my pictures. If you look at my work in relation to Diane Arbus's work, I think it differs in because of the humour. Humour plays an important part in my photographs.
Humour? In what sense?
I think there is a tragic comedy to many of the images. This might not be evident in Dorps and Platteland, which are over ten years old, but it certainly plays a part in my new work.
How else would you say your work distinguishes itself from that of Diane Arbus?
I have been influenced by contemporary art to a greater extent than Arbus was. She came from a fashion photography background and also had dealings with the Magnum circle.
When you say that art has influenced your photographic work, who are you referring to?
My work right now is influenced by people such Joan Miro, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, even stone age art. If you look at the new images, there are all sorts of textures on the walls, forms and images that somehow or another have a modern art context. The work is rooted in photography but it also draws on other art forms. For example, in the newer work I create installations within the photographs. The installations aren't truly installations but photographic installations. Ultimately, I use aspects of painting, sculpture and installation to create images that have a different and more complex meaning than is found in more traditional photography.
If you look at the work I have been producing over the last five years it is more rooted in Miro or Bacon, even Samuel Becket than it is in the tradition of Diane Arbus. It has a meaning that isn't about outsiders anymore; the meaning is much more multi-dimensional.
Possibly a final question on the subject of Diane Arbus. She stepped out of her social milieu to document a world she was socially disconnected from. Having grown up in New York and then chosen to document a contrasting subject matter particular to South Africa, it would appear that you have done much the same as Arbus. Am I attaching too much weight to your biography?
There are so many things that go into one's personality. It is really hard to know why one has ended up as one has. On the one hand, I have always retained a core that is unchanged. It is an important thing to emphasise, that this core is fixed and unchanged. All my other experiences add to this and accentuate and clarify aspects of my personality.
It is possibly easy to see my work as having rejected my liberal values and the way I grew up, but I would like to think of my work as a lot deeper than that. I am Freudian in a lot of ways. The Id is really the driving force behind my art and is almost impenetrable.
In terms of the people that you co-opt into the staged images you currently create, what role do they play in the image? I am sure that this is an area that some viewers might find problematic.
I think every picture comes differently and it is very hard to generalise. Sometimes the situation is that I am telling the person what to do, but can you tell someone to blink one-way and not another. You can direct the subject to a degree but usually there is something more spontaneous happening that is interacting with the environment around it. You can only direct so much, and the subject can only act so much. Ultimately, it is all a question of perception and cognition.
You mentioned Bacon and Beckett earlier. Why? What's the attraction in them specifically?
They are intense, minimalist, disturbing. They portray both comedy and tragedy.
Would you be satisfied in using those descriptors to describe aspects of your own work?
If you had to choose someone in literature who comes closest to my work I would say Becket. His work was minimalist. My work is very structured and minimalist too. It involves black humour; it is disturbing; it is about life and death; it is about futility; it is about how to pass time.
I would to steer the conversation elsewhere. Historically, a lot of the images produced in South Africa have said very little (overtly at least) about the narrator. Care to comment?
I read an article recently that crudely distinguished between documentarists who take photographs and artists who make photographs. It is a bit simplistic but nonetheless useful. If you look at South African photography, it has really been bound up in making socio-political statements. That was always the purpose of the work. I think it is still a weight in current photography due to the political dynamic here. I think that with so few new ideas coming out of the visual arts in general here, it is very hard for people to get beyond viewing photography as a socio-political document.
You are often viewed as something of an outsider. Have you ever possibly wondered how your work dialogues with other South African photography?
I have felt like an outsider. If I am honest, I must state that my photography has been antithetical to work has been produced here over the years. The type of work that is being produced here has been very uninspiring. I must state that I do think David Goldblatt has made a tremendous contribution to photography locally. Obbie Oberholzer also did some interesting work for a while, capturing people's imagination with his travel images.
Also, Santu Mofokeng has been one of the few black photographers that has caught my eye. They should all be praised for their contribution. Whether I have been inspired by their work is another story. I must add that my exposure to local photography is rather limited. PhotoZA has helped change things a lot on Johannesburg over recent years.
Has it been frustrating, this outsider position you occupy?
I think it has been frustrating in some ways and good in others. I think that many artists have had this problem over the years, whether in South Africa or elsewhere. This happens, I don't feel aggrieved, it is just the situation as I experience it. While there might be certain people who are threatened by what I do, often when I go out people all know my work and congratulate me. I am really amazed how many people know what I am doing, and are really enthusiastic.
If there is one thing that is disappointing, though, it is how unimportant art is in the general world we live in. It can be disillusioning. It is the most disappointing thing I have experienced as an artist, actually recognising how little society actually cares for art in general.
Again changing tack, can we discuss your choice of black and white?
I see myself as blessed in some ways that I using black and white. It is a dying art form. It is also a very complex art form. I grew up in the tradition and it has taken me decades to perfect the media. The whole craft of black and white and the way of seeing in black and white is disappearing. If you go to a major art faire, be it Basel or some other one, there are only a few black and white photographs, the rest are in colour.
What equipment do you use?
I am one of those people who stuck to the 6 x 6 format. I have used the same camera, a Rolliflex, for over 20 years. A lot of galleries suggest changing, but I think there is something to be said for getting better and better using the same equipment. I think all good art is a matter of penetration, going deeper and deeper.
Looking at your process, how often do you take photographs?
I take pictures four afternoons a week. I think it is very important to keep just keep going. The real learning process comes through taking pictures all the time.
Where do you travel to take them?
Over the last ten years most of the photos have been taken in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Vereeniging. I don't travel into the countryside at all anymore.
And the human subjects?
The human part of the picture is only one part of the picture and it won't work unless the other elements work. When I look at my work it is about everything in the image. Actually it is more difficult for me to find backgrounds to work with than a person to work with. Just getting a person for a documentary image is relatively easy but it is difficult to find places with multi-dimensional, complex meanings to interact with my subjects. That's the real challenge.
The real hard part is going beyond the present circumstances that exist and extending the work into another dimension that people aren't conscious of. That takes imagination, which is ultimately the subject of my work. It is about my way of seeing via my imagination. There is whole reality in front of you and a whole Id personality behind the camera. When one takes images it is really about looking in the mirror, which is why most photographers go out and find a subject to be the dirty one.
How do you cope with the delight or dismay that comes from people attempting to understand your images in writing?
In the beginning I used to take it more personally, whether it was negative or positive. Now that there are more articles being written than before, the effect is not quite as great. I find that there are very few people who say anything with great insight. What you tend to see in a lot of the work is people repeating ideas over and over. Most of the work doesn't say anything, is peripheral. It is pat of an industry that is self-serving. There are as few good art writers as there are artists. The key in the end is to focus on one thing, and that is who you are.
If this process of image making as you describe it is inward looking, is it ever punctuated by a terror? I mean this in an existential sense.
I don't distinguish terror from anything else. It is there. I think fear and terror are the things that are most crucial in good works of art. If you don't put them in, then somehow or another the work doesn't have longevity and is just decorative. It is really important to be in touch with terror because it is something that is there for everybody.
As a photographer I have to find a way of taking a very amorphous sensibility and directing it into an environment to create complex meanings, which are not easy to decipher, for me or anybody else. Sometimes people ask me what is the meaning behind all of this stuff. I usually pose a return question. 'Who are you?' I ask 'Can you please tell me that in a few words.' That is what my pictures are ultimately about: Who are you?
