Roger Ballen: Boarding House 2009, Signed

ROGER BALLEN: BOARDING HOUSE – SIGNED BY THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Phaidon Press (March 29 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 454 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 28.89 x 1.91 x 30.8 cm

Asking USD$200.

Ballen, Roger & David Travis. London & New York. 2009 (2010).: Phaidon Press Ltd.. Later Printing. 4to. Cloth in Pictorial Dust Jacket. Photography Monograph. As New/As New. 128pp, 67 b&w illustrations. Designed by Lucy Newell. “Boarding House” captures an imaginary space of transient residence, of comings and goings, focusing on the evocative drawings and sculptural objects as well as the people and animals found there. Compelling and thought-provoking, the sixty-seven photographs (many of them previously unpublished) are like images from a waking dream; with layers of rich detail, flashes of dark humour and an altered sense of place”. A brand new, pristine example of the hardbound 2010 Phaidon printing additionally BOLDLY SIGNED “Roger Ballen” in black marker on the title page.

ABOUT THE WORK

Roger Ballen’s work focuses on a strange and alluring place that he calls the Boarding House, where he directs his subjects in a unique collaboration of imagination and reality. Toying with fantasy, Ballen’s transient compositions create a question mark over our preconceptions of photography, creating a theatre out of the building blocks of documentary.

In Contemplation the chaos has abated, and we witness a clean shirtless man holding a white duck to his face. Sitting in a man-made ditch he appears to be deep in conversation with the duck, listening intently to its story. An electrical cable is pinned neatly to the wall, but it seems not to be coming from, nor leading, anywhere. As always in the boarding house, the only consistency is the dirt and dust of its abandonment.

Boarding House shows an imaginary space of transient residence, of coming and goings, of people sheltering in a strange place they are using for their immediate survival, furnished with objects that are necessarily for an elementary existence as well as mysterious items whose significance is impossible to discern. Remnants function as physical symbols of events that have occurred in this space; broken pieces of a functional reality exist as the leftovers of scenarios that were played out here. In his introductory essay to the book, veteran photography curator David Travis addresses this new body of work. Having evolved from and developed out of Roger Ballen’s previous work, Boarding House differs in that the photographs have become even more formally sophisticated, and the sense of collaboration between the artist and his subjects increasingly evident.

—Courtesy of Phaidon

ABOUT ROGER BALLEN

Roger Ballen is an American photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ballen’s work in black-and-white analog photography has a surrealistic, elegiac quality, a sign of the artist’s belief that the medium is seeing out its final days, soon to be supplanted by digital technology. Ballen contends that black-and-white photography doesn’t aim to faithfully replicate the world as it’s seen (the way color photography does) and therefore offers a more abstract, interpretive way of depicting the world. He has published twelve books to date, including his earliest series of photographs taken in the rural villages in South Africa known as dorps, and his work has received recent widespread attention for his collaborations on music videos for the South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord.

Ballen is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Award in Photography (2006), Photographer of the Year, Recontres d’Arles (2002), and Best Photographic Book of the Year from PhotoEspana (2001), among others, and his work is in the collections of numerous international institutions, including California’s Berkley Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, South Africa’s Durban Museum, Munich’s Fotomuseum, the Johannesburg Art Museum, and Paris’s Maison Europene de la Photographie. His most recent book, Asylum of the Birds, was published by Thames and Hudson, London in 2014.

Roger Ballen (b. 1950) has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for almost 30 years. Born in New York, he worked as a geologist and mining consultant before starting his photographic career by documenting the small villages of rural South Africa and their isolated inhabitants. His images are both powerful social statements and disturbing psychological studies. Ballen’s book Outland, also published by Phaidon, was named Best Photographic book of the Year at PhotoEspaña 2001, Madrid, Spain.

David Traviswas chair of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago until July 2008, having worked at the institute for 36 years. He curated more than 150 photography exhibitions at the institute and also guest-curated exhibitions at other American museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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