INSCRIBED & SIGNED BY ROGER BALLEN, P
ublished by Thames & Hudson, 2016, hardcover, illustrated, condition: very good.
An immersive new monograph from the critically acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen The Theatre of Apparitions is an immersive and groundbreaking new monograph by the critically acclaimed art photographer Roger Ballen. The author of numerous publications, including Asylum of the Birds and Outland , Ballen is best known for his psychologically powerful and masterfully composed images that exist in a space between painting, drawing, installation, and photography. This book is both a departure from his existing oeuvre and the culmination of his unique aesthetic linking image-making and theatrical performance. Separated into seven chapters or acts, these Ballenesque images take readers on a journey deep into the subconscious. Initially inspired by the drawings and marks people make on their environment, Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then "drawing on or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The resulting images are like prehistoric the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen carves his thoughts and emotions. Fossil-like facial forms and dismembered body parts co-exist uncomfortably with vaporous, ghost-like shadowsthese images have the capacity to shock, inspire, amuse, and even elate viewers. Timeless and innovative, earthly and otherworldly, physical and spiritual, his work transcends the traditional concepts of photography. 90 black-and-white photographs.
Roger Ballen is an American artist living in Johannesburg and working in its surrounds since the 1970s. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Marginalized people, animals, found objects, wires and childlike drawings inhabit the unlocatable worlds presented in Ballen's artworks. Ballen describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.
