Roger Ballen

Ten copies of two motifs and three artist’s proofs comprise this edition. Each photograph on gelatin silver paper is signed and numbered by the artist. The edition includes the publication Roger Ballen. Photographs 1969–2009.

For more than thirty years the photograph Roger Ballen has been depicting the impoverished white rural population of South Africa—day laborers, security guards, and workers who earn a meager living on the so-called flatlands. The theatrically staged scenes are set in simple homes whose bare interiors are transformed into claustrophobic stages upon which the actors perform, sometimes with a sense of violent expressiveness. Through Ballen’s later stagings, his documentary style mutates into a fiction-based one that continues to characterize his art to this day. This edition was created for the large, traveling retrospective (2009–2012) of Ballen’s work.