During the last several years, photographer Roger Ballen has created an increasingly fictionalized world. Founded in the documentary photography tradition, Ballen's hybrid view, which New York Times Magazine picture editor Kathy Ryan has called "a one-man school of photography," veers between portraying a remote world shaped by poverty and isolation to an increasingly surreal universe where people have largely retreated from the scene.

Ballen, who was born in New York and has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for 30 years, was featured in the 2008 New York Photo Festival. A selection of his images from Boarding House (Phaidon 2009), made between 2004 and 2008, is currently on view at Gagosian Gallery.

Left to right: Boarding House, 2008; Bite, 2007; Fragments, 2005. Copyright Roger Balleln, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

The series, shot in a dilapidated building outside of Johannesburg, presents a series of bizarre images more often populated by animals than by people, who are reduced to fragments in a slice-of-life scenario gone mad. A former warehouse hidden among sky-high mine tailings, the structure is crowded with post-aparthied poor and disenfranchised, among them witchdoctors, criminals and mine workers. This strangely captivating location has served as the focus of Ballen's photographic work over the last four years. As he says: "It is difficult to explain this place except that I think it exists in some way or another in most people's minds."

Tonight, Ballen appears in conversation with Darius Himes at the SVA Theater in an evening sponsored by Dear Dave magazine. In a recent interview for American Photo magazine, Himes asked the photographer what brought about the evolving shift in his work, causing it to flow from a narrative mode to a more surreal one. Ballen replied, "The most important stylistic change was adding the drawings and sculptural pieces during the period at the beginning of Shadow Chamber (Phaidon 2005). Those sculptural pieces and drawings, I think, add a very particular and peculiar level of meaning and complexity to the work. It is a style and vision that is purely my own and I truly think it's quite separate from anything in photography at this point in time. I feel very pleased with that. The influence of other artists is way behind me. I'm looking into my own psyche and delivering that in a very formalistic and clear way. I don't see any point in being introspective and not being able to express it. That's what lay at the heart of these."

Monday, November 9: Roger Ballen in conversation with Darius Himes, tonight at 7:00 pm. SVA Theater, 333 West 23^rd Street, New York, NY. Free and open to the public.
Tuesday November 10: Roger Ballen will sign copies of Boarding House at the Gagosian Shop from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. 988 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. For information: 212.744.9200.
Through December 23, 2009: The exhibition continues at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. 212.744.2313.

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