Roger Ballen at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
by Brenden Gray
Photography cannot give the viewer a true sense of place or situation. Roger Ballen's pictures subvert our apprehension of the real and emplacement, by setting up an uneasy relationship between photography as document and photography as fiction. As a viewer, I am not so much disturbed by the subject matter so much as my inability to make a decision about whether what I am looking at is an artifice constructed by the photographer (possibly in conjunction his subjects) or a captured reality or 'truth'.
Ballen masterfully sets up this uneasy relationship between viewer and subject matter. I can only identify what I don't know. This is perhaps because of the inherent limitations of photography: its failure to give an exhaustive description of a situation. In Bent Back, a skinny middle-aged white man, wearing shorts only, stands arching his back to clutch a pot plant in a bare room. The plant rests on a spider-like, welded steel pedestal, reminiscent of a Louis Bourgeois sculpture. The most interesting part of the composition is a thin, bent steel rod, an upside down U hanging conspicuously on the wall echoing the shape of the man's spine. The bent rod draws the viewer's attention to the particularities of the man's spine and, as in so much of Ballen's work, clues inserted into the photographed environment serve to enhance the viewer's experience of the subject's physical and social marginality. It is impossible to know whether the subject consented to this insertion.
It seems that Ballen throughout his oeuvre is attempting to debunk the myth that photography is an objective medium. He makes us aware of the constructedness of the photographic situation by providing clues that the image is composed, made, rather than taken. These insertions are violent - they disturb the viewer's expectations of photography. Those who think that Ballen's photographs are 'slices of life' have missed the point and will inevitably feel that the work is disturbing and even unethical, especially if they are white viewers, given his interest in poor white communities.
The point is that, as viewers, we cannot verify our assumption that what we are beholding is truth, because of the limitations of the medium. Whenever I look at photographs that seem to commit some kind of violence upon their subjects, (in the sense that Susan Sontag suggests), I want more information to verify my misgivings. I want to be able to look over my shoulder, on the other side of the photographic image, into the moment before the shutter opens and closes, behind the scenes, and know with absolute certainty the situation in which the image was made. The photographic image leaves us guessing about the social circumstances of its own production. In this sense photography is at once cryptic and transparent.
Did Ballen or the man in Bent Back make the decision to hang the bent rod on the wall? Did Ballen offer him money to perform like a circus animal or was the decision made together? Did family members, friends, photographic assistants etc. participate in the spectacle of production? Did Ballen eat from the table of his subjects? Is he a guest, a member of the family, or a stranger with money? Ballen leaves us in a situation where we have to guess at the relationship between the photographer, instrument and subject.
Ballen's work sits uneasily in a cannon of South African photography, one that values presenting the dignity of marginalised subjects. Photographers like Terry Kurgan and Lolo Voleko work very hard to respect the subjectivities of their sitters. At least Ballen's work is honest about its position, unlike the work of Pieter Hugo that professes to repossess the sitter's dignity and then proceeds to denigrate it with unsympathetic posivitism.
Despite the protestations that Ballen's work is unethical, there are quite profound moments of sympathy in some of these pictures. In Room of the Ninja Turtles, a partially naked boy wearing a plastic gorilla mask lies at the bottom of the picture, on the floor, behind a bare mattress. Above him, on a bare unpainted wall are drawn what appears to be the boy's own portraits of Ninja Turtles, that grimace humorously at the viewer. These drawings and the mask are clearly self- presentations on the part of the subject, which are acknowledged in the title. So the work registers the participation of the subject in its construction.
However, at the same time there are signs that the sophisticated composings of the photographer are dominating the situation - the gorilla mask reads as a death mask, the boy reclines in a pose suggesting internment or mummification, the white chalk faces read as spirits leaving the body of the 'dead' boy. The composition is Byzantine, showing the zones of the mortal and the heavenly. So how do we as readers determine the terms of engagement between subject and photographer in making this image? We cannot speak of Ballen's sympathy for his subjects without knowing this first. The point is that viewers may not know the signs of sympathy in a social situation that is foreign to a generally middle class public and it is perhaps this that makes the work so interesting, its sense of otherness and the uncanny.
What is striking about this mid-career exhibition is Ballen's interest in erasing, or forcibly removing the human subject from its own environment. Bodies present themselves unashamedly in the early work and then begin to be submerged by their condition, covered by their own material culture, fractured by their environment. In the more recent work they are replaced by indices of their removal or disappearance, wall scribblings, interior structures, broken furniture, ragged possessions. The detritus of a disappearing community scars the environment and is becoming more and more the subject of Ballen's work. The question is whether the subjects are disappearing because Ballen is exposing his real interests - a formal preoccupation with the medium, a kind of situation-specific, action painting/photography where the constructed environment or social situation becomes the medium of the work. Or is Ballen saying something here about the state of these small towns and the communities that live there?
Brenden Gray is a Johannesburg-based artist and writer. He lectures at the Greenside Design Centre
Opens: March 8
Closes: May 27
Johannesburg Art Gallery
Klein Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 725 3130
Email: job@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tue - Sun 10am - 5pm
