40 Facts About Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition.

Roger Ballen's father was an attorney and the founding partner of McLaughlin, Stern.

Roger Ballen's mother was a member of the famous photo agency Magnum from 1963 to 1967 prior to opening the Photography House Gallery with Inge Bondi in New York City in 1968.

Roger Ballen became acquainted with the photographs of Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Elliot Erwitt, Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson either from published photographs in albums or through personal acquaintance.

Roger Ballen attended Scarborough School, New York, and went to Camp Stinson during his childhood summers.

Roger Ballen was interested in the realism of Rembrandt from a young age, and was drawn to photographing elderly men.

Roger Ballen later studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, which was an epicenter for the 1960s counter-culture.

Roger Ballen spent the subsequent five months at the Art Students of League of New York.

Roger Ballen began a series of 'field photographs' of streets, earthen paths or walls and developed an interest in observing the life of young boys.

Roger Ballen kept Kodak Tri-X or Plus X film in a green canvas knapsack which he would tie to his legs during meals or overnight train rides, or tied to hotel bedposts.

Roger Ballen processed the film and would send it to his father in New York.

Disillusioned by the idea of commercial photography, Roger Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he received in PhD in mineral economics in 1981.

Roger Ballen permanently settled in Johannesburg in 1982, where he worked as a self-employed mining entrepreneur until 2010.

In 2018, Roger Ballen received an honorary doctorate in art and design from Kingston University.

In 2008, the Roger Ballen Foundation was founded to promote the advancement of education in photography in Africa.

Roger Ballen has emphasized his works do not have a sociopolitical agenda; they rather make a psychological and aesthetic statement.

Roger Ballen has stressed that these subjects are not anonymous; he has developed close friendships with them over the course of the history of working with them:.

Roger Ballen emphasizes that these worlds are an artistic reality, in which there is a conversation and interaction of visual elements to create formal harmony.

Roger Ballen seems concise form and complex meaning in his images.

Roger Ballen photographed Woodstock in the summer of 1969, producing a series of photographs that were only published recently in the New York Times, on the 50th university of the revolutionary music festival.

In Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa, Roger Ballen documented the small towns and villages in unmodernised "hinterlands" of Apartheid South Africa, visited during his mineral exploration.

Roger Ballen has often stated that Dorps was his most important project in that he went "inside" metaphorically and physically, started using flash, found objects such as wires and walls.

Roger Ballen encountered the archetypes that he would develop over the course of his career.

Roger Ballen gained international acclaim from his next series Outland, where these psychological studies moved from documentary photography into realms of fiction.

Roger Ballen photographed his subjects at a house in a secret location on the outskirts of Johannesburg so that the images became greater metaphors for spaces in the mind.

Roger Ballen describes that the "house" in these photographs is a place of a landlord who allowed birds he collected to fly all over the house, cage-less.

In 2014, it was clear that after many years of creating photographic images, Roger Ballen had developed a need to transcend what people refer to as pure photography.

Roger Ballen became increasingly involved in video installations, collage, painting and other multimedia.

Roger Ballen - Die Antwoord: I Fink U Freeky was a book collaboration with Die Antwoord, with group's leaders, Yolandi and Ninja, as the photographic subjects.

In 2015, Roger Ballen created a conceptual installation artwork in Finland's Serlachius Museum in Mantta.

Roger Ballen transformed a dilapidated house in the Finish forest into a complete sculptural entity that was installed in the museum's new pavilion.

Roger Ballen has subsequently built installations all over the world, for example in the Istanbul Museum of Art, Galleria Massimo Minini 2016, Brescia, Italy; 2017, Les Rencontres Arles, Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town, City Passage, No Exit Revisited Wiesbaden; Museo de Fotografia, 2018, Fortaleza, Brazil.

In 2018, Roger Ballen released his first series of colour photographs after Leica gave him a colour camera with which to experiment with.

Whilst making the film using the Leica SL zoom lens, Roger Ballen experimented with taking some still shots in colour.

Roger Ballen began drawing on canvas during the first South African Covid lockdown of March 2020.

Since construction of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts was halted due to the pandemic, Roger Ballen set up an ad hoc painting studio in this used unfinished, empty building, and worked there for two months in isolation.

Roger Ballen founded the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in 2018.

Roger Ballen created the centre to exhibit, educate and promote art related to the African continent.

Roger Ballen commissioned Joe Van Rooyen of JVR Architects to design a multifunctional structure.

Roger Ballen was influenced by simplicity, weightlessness and complex circulation of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando's The Tokyo Art Museum.