My Interview with Roger Ballen
The new issue of Seesaw magazine is now online, and the current issue features my interview with South African photographer Roger Ballen, whom I consider one of the most fascinating artists working today. He’s also a very thoughtful and opinionated man, and I gained a lot of insight into his work from talking to him, and was fascinated to hear his thoughts on the nature of photography and why so many artists using photography just can’t get it right.
Your photographs tend to always have an element of spontaneity to them, as still as they might appear.
There has to be. That’s such an interesting thing that I’ve discovered in photography. A lot of artists today use photography, and they create these sort of installations or conceptual photographs. But you remember almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and you have to figure out the guy’s theory to get into the work. The reason the images don’t get inside you is because the artists don’t understand anything about photography. You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth, whatever truth means.
The most common question people ask me, especially in Shadow Chamber, is “Is this place real, did you make it, did you do this, did you do that?” The answer is, there are so many answers to that question. Everything you see in Shadow Chamber is me, because nobody else could take those pictures, even if they went to the same place as me. So it’s way of viewing the world photographically, it’s a very complex way of seeing it. Then, each one of those pictures involves thousands and thousands of subconscious and conscious steps to get to that point. Because photography is such an easy medium to master technically, especially with today’s cameras, people don’t realize that it’s not just being able to pick up a camera. When I lift that camera up to take a picture, I’ve gone through thousands of steps to get to that point. That’s what you’re really seeing; it’s a complex view of the world, through my imagination, through my experiences. It’s a science and art at the same time.