Rat cemetery

 South African-based photographer, Roger Ballen came to international prominence during the 1990s for his portraiture, which mixes documentary and fictional elements – with disturbing results. His interest in photography began during his childhood in New York and continued after he moved to Johannesburg in 1982, where his work as a geologist in the mining industry brought him into contact with those living in abject poverty on the rural fringes of small townships in South Africa. 

While he initially photographed his subjects in a social documentary manner, he has since developed a ‘documentary fiction’ style, in which ‘his relationship with his subjects [has] changed from one of observation to collaboration, and the resulting tableaux had a distinctly theatrical and at times tragicomic quality’.1

In Ballen’s Shadow Chamber series, his subjects are photographed in small, cell-like concrete rooms, which function as a stage, replete with props such as masks, barbed and twisted wire, ropes, cardboard boxes, black cloths, toys and wall drawings. The compositions are animated by half-clad figures, these interacting with dead and living animals to create surreal and unsettling psychological studies, which explore life, death and the dark side of human existence.

1. Roger Ballen, Shadowland (exhibition booklet), Stills Gallery, Sydney, 2006, unpaged

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator Prints, Drawings and Photographs