Roger Ballen

Ten copies of two motifs and three artist’s proofs comprise this Collector´s 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.