Roland Barthes's well-worn axiom, declaring that a photograph is not merely the sign of its subject but its "trace," receives a strange turn in Roger Ballen's Boarding House. The photos were taken, as Ballen claims, around a half-deserted rookery belonging to one of Johannesburg's less-appetizing quarters -- but the real setting may be somewhere inside Ballen's head. An American living in South Africa for upward of three decades, Ballen began his career as a documentarian of the Robert Capa stamp, with several essays on life in South Africa's hardscrabble Platteland (the title of his second book). Shadow Chamber, published in 2005, signaled a shift to more symbolic terrain: animals and people appeared alongside still lifes and sculpture in deliberately posed compositions that emanated a singular (not to say creepy) theatricality. Boarding House is in much the same idiom. As David Travis, formerly of the Art Institute of Chicago, writes in the introduction, "in the Boarding Housee confrontoat hangers, body parts, squalor and rodents." The squalor and body parts are real; the Boarding House, perhaps somewhat less so. Ballen's interiors, alive with Basquiat-esque graffiti, are suspiciously picturesque, and Travis hints darkly at the artist's increasing reliance on "an element of fiction." The mysterious contents of the Boarding House stand in for the greater mystery of which the photographs themselves are the evidence: Did Ballen, in fact, work with the denizens of the squat to make his pictures? Or are these false traces of an imagined "Boarding House"? How do we know? --Ian Volner
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Synopsis
"Roger Ballen's photographs are like images from a waking dream: compelling and thought-provoking, with layers of rich details, flashes of dark humor, and an altered sense of place. Blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and autonomic art, his work is both a powerful social statement and a complex psychological study." "Accompanying the exhibition at Johnen Galerie Berlin Phaidon Press publishes Boarding House by Roger Ballen, a new collection of photographs by the South African photographer. Showcasing over 70 black and white images, mostly unpublished, this is Ballen's most formally sophisticated work to date. An introductory essay by photography curator David Travis is looking at these images in the wider context of Ballen's career." Boarding House is a space of transient residence, of comings and goings, of people sheltered in a place they are using for their immediate survival. Basic and fundamental, the structure is furnished with objects necessary for an elementary existence, decorated with evocative drawings, and littered throughout with animals. Remnants function there as physical symbols of events that have occurred in the space; broken pieces of a functional reality exist as the leftovers of scenarios that have been played out there. The altered sense of place of this temporary abode creates a sense of alienation, which acts as a jumping off point for the imagination to run wild. The tableaux have a greater emphasis on drawn and sculptural elements, and the sense of collaboration between the artist and his subjects is increasingly relevant. Similar to his critically acclaimed work Outland and Shadow Chamber, the Boarding House is a journey of discoveryin which we leave our ordinary selves behind and confront a primitive part of the human condition and its psyche. Whether the place is real or imaginary is both indecipherable and irrelevant. It is a place where Ballen's subconscious and the viewer's inhibitions can occupy its own universe.
From the Publisher
"Roger Ballen's photographs are like images from a waking dream: compelling and thought-provoking, with layers of rich details, flashes of dark humor, and an altered sense of place. Blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and autonomic art, his work is both a powerful social statement and a complex psychological study." "Accompanying the exhibition at Johnen Galerie Berlin Phaidon Press publishes Boarding House by Roger Ballen, a new collection of photographs by the South African photographer. Showcasing over 70 black and white images, mostly unpublished, this is Ballen's most formally sophisticated work to date. An introductory essay by photography curator David Travis is looking at these images in the wider context of Ballen's career." Boarding House is a space of transient residence, of comings and goings, of people sheltered in a place they are using for their immediate survival. Basic and fundamental, the structure is furnished with objects necessary for an elementary existence, decorated with evocative drawings, and littered throughout with animals. Remnants function there as physical symbols of events that have occurred in the space; broken pieces of a functional reality exist as the leftovers of scenarios that have been played out there. The altered sense of place of this temporary abode creates a sense of alienation, which acts as a jumping off point for the imagination to run wild. The tableaux have a greater emphasis on drawn and sculptural elements, and the sense of collaboration between the artist and his subjects is increasingly relevant. Similar to his critically acclaimed work Outland and Shadow Chamber, the Boarding House is a journey of discoveryin which we leave our ordinary selves behind and confront a primitive part of the human condition and its psyche. Whether the place is real or imaginary is both indecipherable and irrelevant. It is a place where Ballen's subconscious and the viewer's inhibitions can occupy its own universe.
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