The third edition of the Delhi Photo Festival, held from 30 October to 8 November 2015 at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA), brought together hundreds of photographers from within the country and abroad. On its second day, internationally acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen, known for his harrowing black and white portraits of marginalised white people in South Africa, delivered a talk that packed the IGNCA auditorium. Ballen, an American photographer who has been living in Johannesburg since 1982, discussed many of his works, some of which are also on display in a partial retrospective at the Photoink gallery in Delhi.
The retrospective, which is Ballen’s first show in India, reviews key images from three of his latest books: Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005), and Asylum of the Birds (2014.) The dramatic changes in Ballen’s style, from conventional portraits to more abstract, conceptual works, are laid bare in the show, which will be up at Photoink until 9 January 2016. Aria Thaker, a copy editor at The Caravan, spoke with Ballen about his changing style, his reception in South Africa, and how psychology shapes his photography.
Aria Thaker: Your exhibition traces your work from Outland to Shadow Chamber to Asylum of the Birds. What trajectory can we see in your work through the juxtaposition of these three projects?
Roger Ballen: There was an early artistic stage, which was Outland, when I started to see myself as an artist. My relationship with the subjects was very much a theatrical one, almost a theater of the absurd. But the backgrounds weren’t as elaborate and there wasn’t drawing in the pictures. But there was some sort of artistic intervention between me and the subjects. So it was the beginning, in a way, of me seeing myself as an artist photographer. And in the latest work, the drawings predominate, the photographs are quite complex visually, and the work is much more elaborate and difficult to define. So in a way it shows the first time I started to see myself as an artist in 1995, contrasting that with the latest project called Asylum of the Birds, published in 2014.
AT: Could you talk about your decision to take fewer photos of human subjects, from Outland to Asylum? How did you decide to make that change?
RB: You can’t really do the work that way; you can’t say “I’m going to make a marble sculpture tomorrow.” You move into these things gradually. And you build on them. It’s an ongoing process rather than waking up that day and deciding you’re going to do it that way. And you do it when you’re ready, and you find the links and the threads through taking your pictures. And then it happens that you take a picture one day, that, for whatever reason—usually because you’re ready to see it, or it happens intuitively or surreptitiously—that you are actually able to put things together that you didn’t see before. And this starts a growth, a line, a road, that you start to build on. So it’s a very organic process.
And then, I did what I did. I finished with portraiture. It wasn’t challenging anymore, so I moved on to other things, to other aspects of myself, and expanded my aesthetic and challenged me in different ways. It almost inspired the work that way. When people ask me, “what inspires me the most?”—it’s my own work. To be able to create something from nothing. It inspires me that I’ve actually been able to do these things. It keeps me going, because I get fulfillment out of my own creation. Like a person having a baby—from nothing, you have a baby.
AT: Recently, you’ve also been working with video. Visually and technically, how have your experiences in that medium differed from your experiences with film photography?
RB: The narrative of a video is much more explicit than the narrative of a still photograph. A still photograph should have a narrative to it, but it’s a very visual narrative. You can’t say its beginning, middle, and ending, when you look at a still photograph. It’s there in its own implicit way, but very difficult to put your finger on. If it doesn’t have a narrative in its own individual way, then the picture usually doesn’t have any meaning for somebody. It’s not finished. It leaves you not understanding what it’s about. So even the most complicated images, in their way, should be complete in their visual statements. Now we’re talking about visual statements here, visual reality, visual relationships, which are not as definable as in a poem or a short story or a novel. You can’t really say “well, this is the beginning of the picture, and this is the end.” It has to have a logic to it. There has to be a logic that carries through, that is consistent and challenges you instinctually, emotionally and perhaps intellectually.
AT: You’ve described your work as “documentary fiction,” and talked about the “jolt” that we get when we see a fictional image. Why do you think we don’t get that same jolt from, say, news imagery?
RB: Because news imagery, the biggest thing about it, is that the type of way they present the world is so repetitive that you’re hardened by it. Who wants to see another flood, another starving person, another war? You see the things over and over again, so it has no impact. You become immune to the images because the images are presented in such a way that you understand the meaning of them, you’ve digested it. A good art image is one that presents a fresh vision to the mind when the mind is not ready for it. It’s like a virus. You get sick sometimes from viruses because your body’s not ready for it. If it was ready for it, like if you’ve had measles already, you’re not going to get it again. It’s the same sort of thing.
AT: How have people reacted to your work in South Africa?
RB: Well, initially—I think my work is very sophisticated, and the audience in South Africa is a little bit parochial. It wasn’t really a culturally orientated country. It’s been an athletic, sports sort of focus. Most of the people find the work quite complicated, and to be honest with you, above them. It’s above their heads in a lot of ways. And up till about seven, eight years ago, they were quite threatened by what I was doing. It made them uncomfortable. Especially the whites, not the blacks. The blacks have always liked what I do. The blacks sort of didn’t feel defensive about what I did. And they actually like my new work—the drawings, the spirits. The apparitional sort of element, in a way, relates back to their culture. So actually the blacks identify with my work in all sorts of ways that the whites don’t.
But I think I’m seen in a very different light now than I was ten years ago. I’m seen as a very important part of the art culture there, the photo culture there. People aren’t as negative as they used to be, not at all.
AT: About your earlier work, in Platteland and Outland, etc. Why did you choose to photograph that particular community—poor white people—for several projects?
RB: It chooses you, in a way. I don’t figure out “why did I choose birds?” or “why did I choose rats?” I just find something that I feel has deep possibility, extensive possibility to explore. And I start working in that area, and if it keeps opening up to new ideas and imagery, and then I keep working on it. Then the thing starts to grow into a bigger whole. And if it doesn’t, then I move on to something else. So I don’t really have any ideas about where the thing’s going to go. I don’t think it out like a novelist may think about how the whole story evolves— although that’s also a process, and people have different ways of writing. I can’t predict these things, because photography’s about the physical world out there. It’s a physical world. I might want to take a picture of a duck in here, but there’s no duck in here. So what am I going to do? If I’m writing a novel about a duck, I could sit here and talk about a duck. Same thing in painting. But not as a photographer. So that’s a difference. It’s a very big difference.
AT: What do you think have been the social and political impacts of your work? What do you hope your art will provoke, socially and politically?
RB: Well, I don’t see myself as a social or political photographer, I see myself as a psychological one. So my goal isn’t to reveal social problems and try to fix social problems. I’m not a documentary photographer. My goal is to transform psyches. My goal is to better understand my own psyche and hopefully transform that in a positive way. Hopefully, the pictures will have a psychological impact on other people and get them to come to better come to terms with their identity in some way. A lot of people see the pictures as disturbing, and it’s because they haven’t dealt with their own fears. The pictures actually present a mirror to people that scares them a bit, makes them uneasy. Then, hopefully, that instigates a process where they come to terms with their own repression. And I certainly think every human being comes to better terms with their repression and societies become less psychologically repressed.
AT: Do you see some of the criticism you’ve received as an example of this uneasiness, this repression?
RB: Yeah, usually the people who are the most disturbed by what I do are the most repressed. Basically, in a Freudian way, it’s a defense mechanism coming out of them. I forget the name, you know when somebody expresses their fears towards other people, their angers towards other people, as a way of avoiding confronting themselves? You see this, politically, in all ways, and psychologically, in all ways. You see this in consumerism, militarism, racism—all these things are a reflection of people’s inability to come to terms with themselves. The people who criticise me the most are the ones that have the most, actually, to gain from what I do.
This interview has been edited and condensed.