Culprit by Roger Ballen

PLEASE NOTE PURCHASING LIMITS BELOW.

Wednesday greetings, collector friends! It's our last hello of the week, online at least. If you're local, you can come by and see us at the Editions | Artists' Book Fair this weekend. We'll have tons of our prints on view, and many of us from team 20x200 will be there too--it's always fun to meet our collectors in person, after all. First things first, however! And what a thing it is--Culprit, our second edition by South Africa-based photographer Roger Ballen, is the stuff that dreams (sometimes bad dreams!) are made of.

For me, Ballen's work conjures up the places, characters and creepy-crawlies that populate the most anxious of dreams, the dread and regret that rise with the first ascent on a roller coaster, and the manufactured terror of a scary movie flickering in the darkness late at night. My stomach may be knotted at the recollection of all these things, but it's curious to observe how they stir my mind awake in a way that feels like it's good for me. As Sara wrote when introducing Place of the Upside Down, our first edition by Ballen, "these kinds of thoughts reside somewhere in all of us and recognizing that is probably one of the healthiest things we can do. It's, of course, a little clichè but we wouldn't appreciate lightness without some knowledge of darkness--we need both for the other to exist."

It's a short hop from dreamscapes to Freud (what would he think if a patient on his couch were to recount the tableaux depicted?) to an imagined sequence in some unshot Hitchcock film, its cast of characters culled from populations of the abandoned and misbegotten, with the occasional criminal in the mix. Whether it's Freud or Hitchcock driving the narrative I'm creating, there's a soundtrack that wells up in the background: a drumbeat that foretells certain and mounting danger, sharp screechy crescendos as creatures go from inanimate to skittering, and a carnival organ diving and climbing persistently in the background as some unseen protagonist struggles and fails at every attempt to wake from a dream (or perhaps to escape from some gritty reality?).

It's certainly exhilarating to get into and to emerge from Ballen's work, though there's not much that's easy about it. His images stand in stark contrast to the other creatures which have populated the prints we present to you, and being able to offer his work here, alongside some of the decidedly lighter fare found in our archives, is one of the clearest signs of success I can point to in our short history. In you, dear collectors, we have discovered voracious appetites for not just art, but for expanded horizons. Like Sara, many of you are artists who look forward to the opportunity to own work by legendary photographers like Ballen. Others might be skeptical about the grit and incongruity, but have been with us long enough (and read enough newsletters!) to be curious to hear more about how or why I see work like this fitting into our archives and/or on your walls. And some of you might be thinking "What ARE they thinking with this craziness?" But you know what? That's OK too. If you're sure you don't like something, I encourage you to embrace it and think about why it pushes your buttons in the ways it does. That's often the quickest path to figuring out why you love the things you love.

Love it or hate it--whether it's this particular edition or any of the hundreds in our archives--I believe that 20x200 is at its very best when it sparks conversations, challenges its collectors and broadens horizons. Our first Ballen edition precipitated an interaction that literally brought me to tears when I read about it on Tumblr this past summer. Upon having his Ballen print hand-delivered by his postman, Matt Niebuhr (a photographer himself!) discovered that the postman was a major 20x200 collector. And it didn't stop there! Turns out that the staff of a certain Portland P.O. makes a habit of exchanging 20x200 gift certificates and of talking about what they like, and why, to boot. How cool is that? Even cooler still was that this revelation prompted a conversation, then and there on Matt's porch, about Ballen's work.

I'll leave you collectors here to think and chat. If you are in NYC, I hope you'll take up the rare chance to talk with team 20x200 about the work in person--something that we're all looking forward to doing.

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING PURCHASING LIMITS:
- We're limiting collectors to two 10"x8" and 14"x11" prints each, and only one per collector for prints 20"x16" and larger.
- This edition is not eligible for any discount or promotion.
- We reserve the right to refund purchases if we determine that a single collector has acquired multiple prints or used a discount code.
- We are also offering an off-menu edition of five 40"x30" prints. Please email collector@20x200.com for more information.