Wednesday Edition: Roger Ballen
10"x8" ($50) | 14"x11" ($100) | 20"x16" ($500) | 30"x24" ($1000)
PLEASE NOTE PURCHASING LIMITS BELOW.
Good morning collectors! It's Sara today, proud and humbled to introduce you to the work of Roger Ballen.
Ballen was one of the first photographers I studied in high school. At that time, he had about twenty years of work under his belt and had published his third book, Platteland, a collection of photo-journalistic/documentary photographs of rural South Africa.* A few years later, in 2001, he published Outland, which departed from factual representations—in as much as a photograph can depict "fact," which is another discussion all together—into a realm that is described more by the unknown than the known. Place of the upside down, from 2004, is one of these images.
His work was—and still is—like nothing I had seen. It's strange, somber and seductive. A geologist by trade, when Ballen started taking pictures, he tapped into something that, seemingly, had been lying below the surface all along. His work does not linger at superficial levels—this is the thing so enchanting and terrifying about it. Sooty blacks, chalky whites and about every shade of gray in between, smolder and smudge to form half-dreamy, half-nightmarish images that stumble into the subconscious—an often uncomfortable confrontation. It's not something that's easy to talk (or write!) about but Ballen speaks honestly and openly about this in a Lens Culture Conversation. His forthrightness is a product of his rightness; 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.
After knowing his work through books for about a decade, I had the opportunity to view Ballen's photographs in person when I moved to New York: first in the 2008 New York Photo Festival and then about a year later at Gagosian Gallery. While browsing books is an intimate experience, seeing Ballen's prints is bewildering. In Place of the upside down, orientation is lost—is it sideways? day or night?—and space is flattened into those gritty grays, and what is constructed or drawn versus found is not known. Any sense of distance is stripped away and the world that Ballen has created doesn't seem so far from the one you're standing in. Every crack in a wall, any stray mark, fallen branch or wandering pet begins to mean something else. If you're adverse to something you're seeing (like a rat), it's strangely harder to get away from—you can't just turn the page—and you must keep on looking.
*(Like Todd Hido's—whose nearly sold-out print was released last month—Ballen's books are sought after; many early editions are entirely unavailable.)
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.
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