Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen is an American photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ballen’s work in black-and-white analog photography has a surrealistic, elegiac quality, a sign of the artist’s belief that the medium is seeing out its final days, soon to be supplanted by digital technology. Ballen contends that black-and-white photography doesn’t aim to faithfully replicate the world as it’s seen (the way color photography does) and therefore offers a more abstract, interpretive way of depicting the world. He has published twelve books to date, including his earliest series of photographs taken in the rural villages in South Africa known as dorps, and his work has received recent widespread attention for his collaborations on music videos for the South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord. 

Ballen is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Award in Photography (2006), Photographer of the Year, Recontres d’Arles (2002), and Best Photographic Book of the Year from PhotoEspana (2001), among others, and his work is in the collections of numerous international institutions, including California’s Berkley Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, South Africa’s Durban Museum, Munich’s Fotomuseum, the Johannesburg Art Museum, and Paris’s Maison Europene de la Photographie. His most recent book, Asylum of the Birds, was published by Thames and Hudson, London in 2014.