Roger Ballen, Cat in fish tank, Silver Gelatin Print, 40cm x 40 cm, 2000
Johan Thom will be in conversation with inimitable photographer Roger Ballen tonight @ 18h30 as part of his book launch for the new and expanded edition of Outland (2001).
The selection of photographs on exhibition in the Collector’s Room was primarily curated around aesthetic concerns. These would include formal aspects of the work such as the use of line, light and dark tones, composition and so forth.
From a curatorial perspective we feel that the socio-cultural and political dimensions of the work have been explored in great depth. We implicitly accept and understand that Ballen’s work has a deeply political grounding and touches a raw nerve in the politics of representation in post-apartheid South Africa – especially where it concerns issues of whiteness racially speaking (of what it represents or should represent) and of ethics (of power relationship between the photographer and his subjects), for example.
The questions that Thom will touch on during this interview concern the particularity of Ballen’s artistic vision – the photographs as artworks the photographer as an artist. He says about the interview: “I hope to expose if only partially something of Ballen’s artistic working methods and processes, i.e. making; conceptualizing; selecting and generally creating the imaginative world that has become the hallmark of his artistic output since the time of first publishing Outland in 2001”.
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