Shadow Chamber

Description

Roger Ballen (b.1950) challenges the ways in which we perceive the reality of photography. His striking, ambiguous images of people, animals and objects posed in mysterious, cell-like rooms occupy the grey area between fact and fiction, blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art forms such as painting, theatre and sculpture. This most recent body of work, made between 2000 and 2004, is a product of the decades Ballen has spent working with and photographing people on the fringes of South African society.

Robert A Sobieszek (1943-2005) was Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he served in various curatorial positions, including Director of Photographic Collections at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He organized over 50 exhibitions and authored 10 books, including LACMA's Robert Smithson: Photo Works and The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. Born in New York City in 1950, Roger Ballen has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for almost 30 years. The son of a picture editor at Magnum, he worked as a geologist and mining consultant before starting his own photographic career by documenting the small villages of rural South Africa and their isolated inhabitants. His images are both powerful social statements and disturbing psychological studies. Ballen's previous book Outland (2001), also published by Phaidon, is indisputably one of the most extraordinary photographic documents of the late twentieth century.

'The images are compelling, with the repeated symbolism playing out recurring themes that we are only partly allowed access to...These are not easy viewing pictures, they're uncomfortable and dark and I can't say why I like them, but I do. And I'm not alone.' (Elizabeth Roberts, B&W)