Shadow Chamber

Since the late 1990s, Roger Ballen's work has moved away from the category of documentary photography and into the realms of fiction. Though he continues to portray people on the fringes of South African society, his subjects began to act out dark and disconcerting tableaux, providing images that are as exciting as they are disturbing - undermined by flashes of dark humour. Ballen's most recent images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photography. There is no digital imaging involved: everything shown has happened in front of the camera. The images are completely honest, and yet they are also fabricated. In Shadow Chamber, Ballen focuses on the interactions between the people, animals and objects that inhabit his unique image space. The rooms in his pictures are actual places that we know to exist, yet they are made unsettling and strange, logical yet utterly impossible. The human and animal beings in Ballen's photographs appear isolated, estranged and lost, yet strangely empowered at the same time. In 2002, Ballen was named Photographer of the Year by Rencontres d'Arles. His work is included in numerous important private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Johannesburg Art Museum, South Africa; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.Introduction by Robert A Sobieszek Roger Ballen (b.1950) is best known for his award-winning photographs of people on the fringes of South African society as depicted in Outland, also published by Phaidon Shadow Chamber debuts his most recent body of work Ballen's striking, ambiguous and often disturbing images blur the boundaries between documentary photography and other art forms Collaborating with his subjects, Ballen has secured his position as a highly collected artist, creating an extraordinary world that is part dream, part nightmare