Opus Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Roger Ballen Biography

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, and he has lived in Johannesburg since the 1970s.

Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen’s photography moved on in the late 1980s to their inhabitants. By the mid 1990s his subjects began to act where previously his pictures, however troubling, fell firmly into the category of documentary photography, his work then moved into the realms of fiction.

Ballen’s recent work enters into a new realm of photography — the images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs.

Roger Ballen has exhibited widely, and his work is held in the collection of museums and institutions including but not limited to Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fotomuseum, Munich; Johannesburg Art Museum; Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.