Roger Ballen was 19, 55 years ago this week.
He had just lost his summer job as a camp counsellor for inciting peace among his charges and so he did what 400,000 other young people did that week. He went to the Woodstock Art and Music Fair.
He took his high school graduation present — a Nikon FTN — and did what he had been doing since he was 13 with his first camera — he mediated the chaos and wonder of the moment through his lens.
His mother had worked for the Magnum photographic agency and had a photographic gallery in Manhattan where Ballen was exposed to a checklist of all the seminal photographers of the age: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Andre Kertesz. So you could argue that the medium was in his blood.
The photographs he took at Woodstock were published 50 years later in the New York Times, but he had already established a way of seeing that has resulted in its own descriptive epithet — Ballenesque.
It is a lifetime’s body of work that has excavated the strange, dark corners of the collective human unconscious. His years of travel from Cairo to Cape Town and Istanbul to New Guinea, followed by his perambulations in the platteland after acquiring a PhD in mineral economics — and a South African connection through his wife and his decision to live here — has resulted in his very particular visual language. This is a documentary exhumation of the human psyche, a place where photorealism meets the surreal set pieces playing out in the theatre of his mind.
On a recent Tuesday morning I find myself deep in the Ballenesque. The guys at Kalashnikov Gallery who represent him in South Africa had organised an evening walk about with wine, which I now regret missing. You can’t really legitimately drink wine at 10 in the morning — but black coffee is not taking the edge off and the subject matter could do with some light numbing of the senses.
Roger is walking me through the inaugural exhibition, The End of the Game, at The Inside Out Centre for the Arts — his new space open to the public by appointment in Forest Town. This is safari dystopia, a deep dive into the unsettling reality of big game hunting over the course of the last century and our fraught relationship with nature. Here is the big game hunter in situ surrounded by all his fetishised taxidermic fever dreams and nightmares — the uncomfortable place where Tarzan is revealed as the beast.
“When I grew up as a young boy, what did I know about Africa? I knew two things, which is what most people knew at the time. One, there are animals like rhinos, hippos, elephants; and two, Tarzan. Yeah. So in the '50s and '60s, growing up in New York, we had five TV channels, and I remember looking at Tarzan movies. So that's what I knew about Africa, and that it was a place of adventure, of colonialism, a place to live and hopefully make a fortune. I am not referring to the people who lived here but to the people who came here for safaris.”
He directs me into a room. “This is a hunter's room that I made as an installation piece, we have his books, we even have golf clubs, radio, family pictures. And around it, we have all these photographs in different places in Africa.” He points at the archival pictures of huge piles of hunted carcasses.
“This is King Edward. This is Roosevelt. That's Hemingway. That's Churchill. What's interesting is I grew up in America, and Roosevelt was seen as the premier conservationist. I'm now talking about the 1960s. He was seen as the most important conservationist in American history. He created all these national parks. Meanwhile, you'll see from the video downstairs, he went on a safari in Africa and killed like 12,000 animals in a short period of time.
When I grew up as a young boy, what did I know about Africa? I knew two things, which is what most people knew at the time
“And same thing with King Edward. You’ll see he was involved in big game hunting, and ultimately he was responsible for some of the bigger parks in Tanzania and Kenya. So these people, they did what they did. They were, on one hand, destructive. On the other hand, for whatever reason, political guilt, who knows what — made some contribution at the end towards conservation.
“It’s the same in America. With the buffalo in the 1800s there were like 160-170-million buffalo and by 1860 there were like 60 left. In South Africa I remember reading about how the wagon trains coming out from the coast would see just miles and miles and miles of Springbok going by, you could sit there all day as they moved from one place to the next. If you drive across the country now, what do you see? Just fences and cows and sheep. We are trying to make exhibitions that have a psychological impact and have something to do with my aesthetic in one way or the other. Those are the general purposes of what we are trying to do here.”
The installations of found objects, taxidermy, disturbing human forms, are like a terrible “Victorian freak show”.
“It’s the same with everybody here. If you look in all these places in the Western world, they think just because the dog falls asleep on your lap that you're in sync with nature. It's the same delusion. We're in sync with nature, but go look around here. What's here? Oh, my cat just loves me. He cuddles up to me day and night. Animals love me. If you look on Instagram, at the memes, I like them. I think they're funny and they're cute. I get all these things on Instagram with the cute little elephant, the cute cat videos, but that's not the world, that's not the reality, it's the delusion of people.”
He has been in the habit of exploring all the delusions. “That's what I'm trying to do all the time, trying to make pictures that get to the primal self, for me and for the viewer. I don't and can't predict what's going on in anybody's head, so I don't deliberately go out and try to make pictures that do this and that. I just take pictures.”
He has been looking his entire life: prisoners at Sing Sing, Woodstock, the state of boyhood around the world, the Platteland, the inner landscape — all recorded in 28 books and acknowledgment as one of the most significant photographers in the world.
I ask him if he gets tired of looking. “If I give a class, I often say: Turn your eyeballs around and photograph what you see. Everything you do, everything you participate in, it's just a matter of brain cells. You are brain cells. That's it. Probably it might be an imagination of who you are, too. That's also possible. Anything's possible. Enigma is the most important word in art.”
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