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Like most other people, I can’t get enough of Roger Ballen at the moment.
Doug McClermont has treated us to a great interview with Roger Ballen. It crescendos in a battery of ‘Ballenisms’ on the evolution of man, the rejection of political correctness and the common id of all great portraits.
Sergeant F. de Bruin, Department of Prisons employee, Orange Free State, 1992 © Roger Ballen
RB: But what is the most important thing in that picture?
DM: His stare?
RB: The wire. Before I saw him I found the wire. And then when I turned the corner there he was … but I associate that picture with the wire. Without the wire there’s no photograph. That’s what the picture is about, not necessarily him. The wire looks like his lips.
DM: I know there’s a formal aspect to the images, but that face has seen so much.
RB: Form makes the content! Without your ribs you’re just a deflated nothing. The forms bring out the content and create meaning in themselves. So it’s very important to see the images as formal instruments as well as the content in and of itself.
DM: But it’s also narrative.
RB: It is, you can’t separate the two.
DM: This guy has seen so much and It’s all reflected right there in his mug. There are so many stories behind those eyes… what we bring to it.
RB: You have to find your own world in that picture. A lot of what you find you can’t explain. You can’t put into words. But you have an emotional relationship. Like life.
DM: If you could have put it into words, you would have written him as a character in a book.
RB: Basically, some people see him as a monkey. The character of a buffoon and a monkey in a prison guard, whatever. There are all those masks you see in the face. The face reveals the human condition in all sorts of ways. He’s funny, he’s tragic.
DM: Like the masks of theater…
RB: He’s vicious. He’s a monkey. He’s a pompous prison guard.
DM: He seems simultaneously weak and evil to me.
RB: Behind the face is always the monkey. Remember that. I’ve been living in Africa a long time. I’ve really seen a lot about the human condition. Behind the face is the monkey. You won’t get me to change that point. I don’t care if every PC person wants to shoot me for it.
DM: In terms of evolution, you mean?
RB: It’s Freudian…
DM: The id.
RB: Yes, the monkey is the id. Each image is like someone’ s id… and then I bring mine and put it on top of it. If it’s good artwork, it’s everybody id in some way. They’re heroes of the human id. Jess and Tessie, [the drooling twins] you see who you were a million years ago…a monkey…and you were that monkey. Subconsciously, genetically in the back your mind it’s the monkey. You’re a monkey. You see it our ancestors, that’s why the picture is so strong. Simple as that, because people relate to it. They’re brutal, they’re simple, they’re drooling but we relate to them. We see ourselves as humans deep inside them. It’s Neanderthal. Half man, half monkey.
DM: Chromosomes definitely come to mind when you see that image.
RB: No, it’s not about chromosomes – that’s PC thinking – the only thing that crosses your mind is: there’s my face. There’s my id. That’s what I come from. I come from a monkey. That’s your cousin in that picture.
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Doug McClemont is the former Editor-in-Chief of HONCHO, Torso, Mandate, Inches and Playguy. His writing regularly appears in publications such as Publishers’ Weekly, Library Journal and Screw. He has written introductory essays for several monographs on contemporary art and is currently at work on a book of short stories entitled Little Morticians.
The blogo-photo-sphere has been spinning the past couple of days with the 2009 Pulitzer Prize announcements. Damon Winter took one gong for “his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.” (Featured Photography). Patrick Farrell secured the other with his “provocative, impeccably composed images of despair after Hurricane Ike and other lethal storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.” (Breaking News Story)
Winter’s images are eye-catching, but to be honest I am suffering from ‘Obama-fatigue’. So saturated were we with so many high-quality images of the new 44th President, I now look for different material. A quick shufties through Winters website revealed all. His portraits of sports stars show a precocious willing to improvise with technique and composition. Winter has a seriously sentimental side also epitomised by his portraits of American Olympians from the 1984 Los Angeles games.
I guess, my hope is that he doesn’t become known as ‘that guy that did Obama’ … which is why I am more interested in his Angola Prison Rodeo photojournalism.
The rodeo featuring the prisoners of Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, is an old – even traditional – event in the Louisiana calendar. Damon Winter is one of many photographers that have covered the community event. It is a raucous spectacle that brings together populations in and outside of the prison.
I still cannot reconcile this event my existing ethics which this event. There’s a charge that the rodeo is exploitative entertainment for which prisoners can suffer serious injury. Yet, I have not witnessed the rodeo-weekend first hand and I have read in the past that this is an event that provides long-term focus and short-term adulation for the prisoner-competitors. All I want to do is bring Winter’s photographs to your attention and hope they’ll compete with Obama for your attentions!
Winter’s pictures capture the strong forces and consequent risks of rodeo competition. I deliberately picked his colour images. The black & white stripes of inmates harry within Winter’s ‘red, white and blue’ palette. The star-spangled palette imbues the series with patriotism, pomp and faux-purpose. I almost feel we are subliminally less inclined to question Angola’s unique display of pseudo-gladiatorial entertainment when the games are suffused with hues of the American flag.
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View Damon Winter’s Obama campaign coverage for the New York Times, and listen to an audio interview with Winter about his experiences. Winter and PDN did an interview in 2008.
“I’m not interested in the political side of it at all. I don’t deny it and know it filters into the work, but I’m just not approaching it from that perspective. I’m interested in exploring inner exile and profound beauty as redemptive and liberating. There is that famous Dostoyevsky quote that ‘Beauty will redeem the world.’”
Anna Shteynshleyger, in an email to Tim Davis. April 21st, 2005
Perm (Grasses), 2001. © Anna Shteynshleyger
Guggenheim time again. Seven photographers were recipients of the big one. All of them are preoccupied with the passage of time. Thomas Joshua Cooper studies waves for a long time; Osamu James Nakagawa studies waves crashing in to cliffs for a long time; Suzanne Opton records the melancholy of veteran soldiers (a subject that will likely last a long time); Cheryle St. Onge makes reference to her Grandmother’s times; and Byron Wolfe has “for nearly twenty years held a deep and abiding interest in ideas about time, change, and the personal relationships one makes with a place.” Brian Ulrich‘s relation to time is that he is the hardest working man in the business and operates like there’s no time left. (I admit, that one’s a step too far).
Prison Photography‘s interest in the Guggenheim Awards for 2009 is specifically with Anna Shteynshleyger.
Siberia is Shteynshleyger’s visual record of the topography of prison labour camp sites and works. Critics and public are likely to know her more accessible work done at the Port Authority of unextraordinary people on escalators unextraordinarily unaware. Port Authority is an ordinary project; I cannot give it much time. Or perhaps Shteynshleyger’s versatility pulling the viewer from Port Authority‘s whim to the import and nonchalance of Siberia is too big of a conversion to devote the belief in both.
Kolyma (Floor), 2002. © Anna Shteynshleyger
With steady assurance Siberia deals with time, as it deals with the site, as it deals with the intelligence of the viewer. Too often a photographer rushes to the physical clue – the visual pointer – to drive home the importance of the political statement he or she intends to make. Shteynshleyger is not interested in explanation. Without the title on the wall and without the catalogue essay her pictures are simply a competent, nay beautiful, collection of large-format colour prints. They are mostly landscapes and, in truth, landscapes that could be from any continent on earth.
Perm (Bush), 2001. © Anna Shteynshleyger
Tim Davis wrote an excellent piece on Shteynshleyger’s Siberia citing ‘paintings of absense’ from art historical cannon, one-off expressions of ‘the sublime’ by genre painters, and the philosophy of modern cinema auteurs. Davis deliberately talks about as many things other than Shteynshleyger’s work in an attempt to position and thus explain Shteynshleyger’s work. It is a fine, fine judgement call;
Anna’s photographs of Siberia, a territory as suffused with suffering as any place on the planet, do not “bear witness” to anything. They are not documents of anyone’s journey. They are not war monuments; they are not apologies. Though her camera is pointing in the direction of historical sites of unremembered trauma, her pictures are not records of the locations of past crimes. They do not reckon with the past. They sidestep the inevitable failure of the photograph to stand for historical events. They are oblique and difficult, refusing any Spielbergian urge to heal through reliving previous horrors.
Some might argue Davis is wrong. That what he identifies as a resourceful, no-label, psuedo-documentary response to massive ideological violence is in fact a confusion of approach on Shteynshleyger’s part. But they would be wrong. William Meyer wrote a critique of Siberia beginning with the observation that many artists and photographers have sifted and surveyed Nazi concentration camps, and frequently (on the shoulders of other artists) have produced resonant work. The audience for art reflecting the holocaust and concentration camp trauma is well versed in the visual vocabulary of such. For Meyer, the Gulag is in a different position;
How many agitate on behalf of its victims? There are few memorials, few markers, few museums, few tourists. Out of sight, out of mind. But Ms. Shteynshleyger wants to show us.
Shteynshleyger is a pioneer and she is showing us how we can understand horror and how we can understand that horror passes. To me, it seems her images are as private as old men and women who hold silent testimony to past events. Just because something is understood doesn’t mean it should be said, and just because something is said does not make it understood.
Untitled (Tires), 2002. © Anna Shteynshleyger
It isn’t that Shteynshleyger’s work is evasive; it just seems she wants a rigorously curious audience as opposed to a docile one. She is quoted as saying;
… be it a metaphysical or cultural concern, whether it’s a critique or a celebration, art remains a practice rooted deeply in the material world. We make likenesses of what we see and transform our world in a very tangible way. Any situation can reveal a reality not apparent at first examination.
If Dostoyevsky is right and beauty is to redeem the world, beauty must either be apolitical or the most beautiful consensus-sealing political position never reached. Politics, in the common understanding of the term, can be a brutish and rude affair. If there is a message to take away from Shteynshleyger’s work it is, perhaps, that we should search for beauty more rigorously and pay more attention to understated, and dare I say it, apolitical positions.
Untitled (Perm Clouds), 2002 © Anna Shteynshleyger
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Anna Shteynshleyger was born in Moscow, Russia in 1977. She came to the United States in 1992. Shteynshleyger received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (1999) and an MFA from Yale University (2001). In 2004 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago mounted a solo exhibition of her Siberia pictures. In 2006, her (12×12 project) was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Art Basel Miami Beach at the Jacob Karpio gallery in Miami, FL. Other exhibitions have been mounted at Moti Hasson Gallery, NY; Murray Guy Gallery, NY; Lombard-Fried Fine Arts, NY; Artists Space, NY; Vedanta Gallery, Chicago; Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago. Shteynshleyger’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; LaSalle Bank Photography Collection, Chicago; Yale University Libraries and the University of Maine Museum of Art. She is the recipient of an Illinois Art Council Finalist Award, Blair Dickinson Memorial Award and Guggenheim Fellowship. Shteynshleyger is currently an adjunct professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago and McHenry County College.
Coverage of aging prison populations will receive more column inches, online commentary, pixels and pingbacks in the coming years. Just as social security needs overhaul in the US and the pension age is to be raised in the UK, so too new means of fiscal policy are needed to cater for the elderly behind bars … on both sides of the pond.
Edmund Clark’s Still Life: Killing Time is a quiet meditation on the slowness, the fabric and the accoutrements of prison life for elderly inmates. It was two years in the making. This was a hard project to track down. It seems all of Edmund Clark’s promotion is done by others; by publishers, journos, gallerists and supporters. Clark has no website. Clark is as inconspicuous as his subjects.
Clark doesn’t do the commentary for the Guardian‘s Audio Slideshow (MUST SEE). In his absence, Erwin James does a great job of whispering the tragic, hard realities of the prison environment. I include and italicise Erwin’s comments below Clark’s photographs.
“It saddens me when I see these pictures, these tokens of disablement, the accoutrements of disability; a chair lift, a walking stick, a walking frame. I think that is when I struggle with the idea that these people should be in prison. If someone is demonstrably infirm, demonstrably not functioning well through age or ill health, a prison environment (which this clearly is) is not the appropriate environment.”
It’s worth noting some background to the series. Elderly prison populations only recently became serious noticeable enough for HM Prison Service to trial different modes of containment. The E-Wing of Kingston Prison, Portsmouth was the first experiment. In 2007, upon publication of the book, Erwin James explained;
The answer was Kingston’s E wing. For eight years, this was home to up to 25 elderly men serving life for murder, rape, child sex offences and other offences of violence. The men were aged from their late 50s to over 80. Many had been in prison for more than 10 years, and several for stretches of 30 years or more. E wing as a special facility for elderly prisoners no longer exists. The only other wing dedicated to infirm and disabled prisoners now is in Norwich prison, Norfolk.
“I think cell bars are a tough one. They offer a difficult vista. When you look through cell bars you are aware that the outside doesn’t belong to you. You’re disengaged. And when you see cell bars with a bit of colour like that – the flower and the card – it’s a bit incongruous. These old guys are still humans.”
But for James, as for myself, and particularly for Clark, this is not about sympathy or compassion for the convicted criminal. It has already been stated that these men are serious criminals. There surely must come a point though when an old man is not the physical threat he once was. Simon Norfolk – a photographer I personally consider one of Britain’s best – wrote for the foreword;
” … why are there bars on the window of a man who can’t walk without a frame. What kind of escape plan can be hatched by a man who can’t remember how to go to the toilet.”
“This picture for me epitomizes the absurdity, and moments of madness the prison system can have. We are keeping someone in prison, who has dementia. They have basic instruction about how to go to the toilet. If there were ever a case for somebody who needs not to be in prison, it would be for that person.”
The only statement I can find directly from Clark, the photographer, is worth meditation.
What you can see in the pictures is to what extent they are engaged with their routine, and on top of their regime and what sort of engagement they have with time. One man, who wore a long grey beard, coped with the passage of time, as far as I could see, by disengaging with it completely. He spent most of his time sitting in his chair … He just sat and disappeared within himself. After about a year I could go and talk to him, and this man was clever, he’d been a captain in the merchant navy and had sailed around the world. I asked him once what was the best place he’d been to and he lifted his head and said, ‘Sao Paulo, I loved Brazil …’ And then suddenly this life came out, his life was all there, hidden away. The bulldog clock on the book cover belonged to him, it was one of his prized possessions.
Apparently, Clark created this body of work spurred by reports from the USA about mandatory sentencing under “Three Strikes Laws” and the consequent swelling of America’s prison population. Clark engaged with Britain’s aging prison population in direct response to demographic disasters in American penal policy. Clark elaborates;
People subjected to it [Three Strikes Law] were swelling the ranks of the prison population, with the result that many men sentenced when young would spend the rest of their lives incarcerated. I wondered what the response in the UK was to those incarcerated for many years – the life prisoners, or ‘lifers’, who face an old age and growing infirmity in an institutional environment still ruled by the survival of the fittest.
Clark made his point by seeking out the UK’s first specialised prison facility for aged prisoners and then produced a body of work that is distinctly British. Photographs of Bond posters, a (British?) Bulldog, Red-top clippings of Diana & the Queen, and framed artwork of common birds to British gardens & allotments; these are not obvious clues to a global appreciation of prison culture. I conclude, Clark thinks globally, acts locally.
“If you are young and strong prison is manageable on the whole. If you feel weak or infirm or poorly it is a harder place to be and these photographs epitomize the frailty factor, the danger of getting old in prison or being old in prison … My feeling about prison is that it is not a place for old people. Prison is one environment for everybody regardless of your circumstances and so what happens is your survival depends on luck and natural resources. And if you’re old you’re not gonna have as much luck as the younger guys.”
“There’s a lot of people in the system who know that prison is not a place for old, infirm, disabled people. And its not. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be separated from society, but I am talking about prison as we know it. The common interpretation of prison is landings, wings, cells, prison officers, dogs, security; that whole encapsulation of captivity. If you are infirm there needs to be another place. We are giving extra punishment to the weak people.”
“There is an argument for separating the old folks from the main prison wing and that is what happened here. It was an experiment. E-Wing. The danger for me is that is becomes a place … you know, they talked of the fetid atmosphere; smelly and hot. The smell of old people. As a society we don’t have a lot of respect for old people.”
Clark’s unambiguous images of mobile aids and instructions for the senile are a clear call for change. His studies of prized-possessions and personal ordering of objects play on emotional responses to depicted vulnerabilities; Clark’s works conspire as a whole (43 images in total) to shape a convincing argument that we should all care about how our prison system accommodates different demographics. The elderly demographic is only growing, only advancing … with time.
As James’ words have served me so well throughout this article I shall close with his take on public opinion.
“I am pleased society is taking this on, because prison is a robust and hostile environment, and in fact the authorities refer to all prisons as hostile environments. That’s how they’re officially termed. That’s not because everyone who goes there are dangerous, but I think prison brings out the worst in a lot of people. It can bring out the best, but often it brings out the worst. And that’s not to say they are bad characters, it’s because people in prison are defensive and they are defensive because they are frightened.”
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All images copyright of Edmund Clark.
Still Life: Killing Time, by Edmund Clark, is published by Dewi Lewis, and avaiable at PhotoEye
Munkhbayar is the director of the women's prison just outside Ulaanbataar, her background is in Law. © Grace Gelder
Grace Gelder is building a portfolio with some impressive images. She graduated with an MA from Bolton University in International Photojournalism , Documentary & Travel Photography. I am chuffed to promote her work because Bolton is one of many mid-sized cities of England’s Northwest that has been the brunt of dismissive attitudes during my childhood and adolescence.
The University of Bolton is helping reshape those ill-informed attitudes and building a reputation for its photojournalism department. This is helped by its partnership with the Dalian College of Image Art, China. Which helps to explain how Gelder came to work on her far-flung series Professional Mongolian Women. Mongolia is just next door, right?
As the Metro puts it, Gelder “counteracts misconceptions of Mongolia as an under-developed country. Her series of striking colour portraits, each depicting one woman in her professional context, follows up a UN report last year that placed Mongolia first in a league table for women’s participation in the workforce.”
I think particularly with her portrait of Munkhbayar, Director of the women’s prison just outside Ulaanbataar, Gelder succeeds in quashing stereotypes that exist regarding Non-western nations, Mongolia itself, and women in those societies. I am just glad Gelder had a prison warden as one of her subjects; as to provide me an excuse to promote her well-informed work. I recommend reading Gelder’s own description of gender relations and equalities in Mongolia.
(Via PhotoMABlog)
When Jehad Nga’s photographed Somali pirates it was at a time when frigates not people were perceived as the main victims of their contemporary skull-duggery. It was also before American military engagement and the associated global media entered the fray
The main reason I focussed on Nga’s work back in December was because his pirate-subjects were imprisoned. Nga’s work at the time was featured in Time Magazine and The New York Times and I’d be lying if I wasn’t part of the consuming public that took more notice of the pictures than the politics.
Since the close of 2008, activities in the Gulf of Aden have ramped up. So has Nga’s career; in photojournalist terms he unleashed another blockbuster this week with his portraits of US Marines in the New York Times. I’ll confess – I’m a sucker; I think Nga’s Chiaroscuro portraits are irresistible. My only problem is that the same aesthetic has been put in place by Nga and I am left confused.
Nga described the jails in which Somali pirates were kept as dark and dank, so his visual language makes sense when working in that context. Has he made multiple photo essays of high contrast, using vibrant colour-schemes and dark negative space. Nga, has to my mind, forged himself a visual brand.
What is the end result of this? Is Nga just playing a longview game, in which his brand sustains longer than the stories? Is Nga just giving the public the cinematic frames it has lapped up previously? Is it problematic that he gives the same treatment to the ‘vilified pirates’ and ‘patriotic heroes’ we’ve seen in the newspapers this week? Are my queries unfair. After all one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. One man’s criminal is another’s political prisoner. Is it even Nga’s place to distinguish, or use visual devices to shape viewers’ thinking? We’d do well to remember Brando and Pacino played great villains, but they were villains we loved to hate.
What do you think? Do you contemplate the character of a subject differently when it is struck by bright pockets of light if it is an American soldier or Somali pirate? How do you reconcile that?
All images, except the Godfather II and Apocalypse Now still (final image) ©Jehad Nga.
98 prisoners are kept in a cell measuring 25 square meters originally designed for 16 inmates. The longest-serving prisoner in one of these cells has been there for 5 years. The prisoners are locked up for crimes as varied as non-payment of alimony to murder. The long-timers sleep in hammocks up high, the newcomers on the floor. Temperatures reach 50 degrees celsius in the summer. The prisoners are the poorest members of society, have poor legal representation, and are disenfranchised from political representation as they have no vote.
Gary Knight, Private Photo Review
Overcrowding at Polinter pre-trail detention centre, Rio de Janeiro © Gary Knight, VII Agency
Originally published in Social Issues #42 last Autumn, Gary Knight‘s astonishing photography at one of the (now closed) overcrowded Polinter Prisons in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Polinters are temporary holding facilities used to house police detainees.
There’s a bit of back story in to Knight’s work in his interview with the Financial Times.
Two things intrigue me about this. Firstly, my research tells me this prison closed down late 2006/early 2007. Why has it taken so long for Knight’s photography to get even short coverage? Secondly, I am astounded by Knight’s answer to the question of how he secured access:
I was doing a project on poverty, and a photographer at O Globo newspaper in Rio introduced me to the governor of Polinter prison – a place with conditions so bad the governor herself was appalled. She wanted something to be done but she couldn’t really let in a photographer from a local paper. She felt more comfortable with a foreigner: I guess she thought that stories published overseas might put pressure on the government from abroad.
Can you imagine a reversal of this logic? That US prison wardens would accommodate foreign photojournalists more readily?
Knight does his part in bringing visibility to the situation, but that doesn’t affect the shut out experienced by local photographers. That said, it is a great example of the power of international photojournalist activity bringing new possibilities to bear.
Detailed information on the Polinter prisons is hard to come by. We should share Knight’s relief that the Polinter he photographed is now closed. Amnesty International mentioned it in its 2006 report on Brazil:
In Rio de Janeiro, human rights groups denounced conditions in the Polinter pre-trial detention centre. In August the unit held 1,500 detainees in a space designed for 250, with an average of 90 men per 3m x 4m cell. Between January and June, three men were killed in incidents between prisoners. Officials in the detention centre were also forcing detainees to choose which criminal faction they wished to be segregated with inside Polinter. In November the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered the Brazilian government to take measures to improve the situation.
Finally, let’s consider with necessary dexterity the role that Pastor Marcos Pereira da Silva plays in all of this. He visits, evangelises, “foot-stomps”, exorcises evil and sends prisoners collapsing to the floor. Knight confesses a “real disquiet about him”. Supporters point to the fact that violence in Polinter has abated since da Silva’s visits, but Knight parries that its easy to influence the most vulnerable of groups.
I cannot bring myself to embed the video of the Pastor at work, but you can follow this link and thusly imagine him bouncing around the walls of a prison, agitating its population and putting on a show they’re not likely to witness again or even understand. I guess different eyes experience different wonder.
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UPDATE (06.01.2012): The Open Society Institute published Justice Denied: Brazil’s Polinters, documentary video focusing on “the costs of excessive and unnecessary pretrial detention.”
The poor conditions are obvious. OSI describes the film as part of their broader work on “a Global Campaign for Pretrial Justice […] helping governments develop bail and supervision systems that can make pretrial detention an exception, and not the rule.”
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Gary Knight, born in England, started working as a photographer in Southeast Asia during the 1980s as Indochina emerged from bitter wars and the region came to grips with the end of Cold War. In 1993, he moved to collapsing Yugoslavia where he returned repeatedly from the siege of Sarajevo through the fall of Kosovo. Between assignments for Newsweek, he documented crimes against humanity.
After 9/11, he worked in Afghanistan and two years later independently followed U.S. troops into Iraq. He covered wars in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia and other breaking news, but Knight’s central focus is on the survival of the world’s poor and fundamental human rights issues.
Knight is founding director of VII Photo Agency. He established the Angkor Photo Festival, is a board member of the Crimes of War Foundation, a trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and Vice President of the Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Foundation.
His work, widely awarded, published in magazines, is in museums and private collections. He has initiated education programs with universities and voluntary agencies, and is the author of Evidence: War Crimes in Kosovo.
If you are going to spend time with anything though, make it dispatches, a superbly edited magazine co-founded by Kinght. It cuts to the core of the issues, the rest of us skirt from distance.
(Found via Travel Photographer)
Cut Loose. Roger Ballen, 2005
In critiques of Roger Ballen‘s photography I haven’t seen more than mere passing references to Abu Ghraib. New York Art Beat coyly described Ballen’s prints as “Reminiscent of the images from Abu Ghraib” and continued, “Untitled (1069) shows a gaunt man clad only in sweatpants. His head hangs down, toes curled and fingers scraping the wall.”
Culture Vulture afforded Ballen just one sentence in its review of the After Nature group exhibition, “Roger Ballen’s b/w photos draw on our deep visual memories of Abu Ghraib, without truly recording any torture.”
In real time and the real world Ballen’s work has absolutely nothing to do with Abu Ghraib. But my charge is to speculate on the meandering visual cultures and cross overs that wash over us daily.
Let me start by saying that Ballen has not in any way been influenced by Abu Ghraib. He began his Shadow Chamber work in 2001 and continued for 6 more years. His visual vocabulary was drawn from his own portfolio and observations from as early as the 70s when he photographed in homes of the poor with exposed wires, smears and semi-feral mammals.
Prowling. Roger Ballen, 2001
New York Photo Festival will have to be special in 2009 if it is to eclipse Ballen’s show-stealing lecture of last years inaugural show. Just as Ballen had quietly plied his craft for decades without much commercial interest, so he quietly took to the stage for the unrockstar 11am slot on the first morning. Many concluded at midday that they may as well go home there and then. Ballen was it; “So if you missed it sorry the festival might just be all down hill after this.”
Why? Apart from being unexpected, Ballen took the viewer deep into a closely controlled isolated world and into the psychological uncertainties of his vision. Ballen is the perfect foil to typologies, minimalist cliche, first-project enthusiasm and the manicured fine art of contemporary photography.
Effigy and Prowling are disconcerting, bizarre, staged and lit with hard flash – in other words they hold the same characteristics as the Abu Ghraib images.
It seems the comparison is so glaring no-one has wanted to state it! Is it with guilt we accept Ballen’s work into an art aesthetic, and then stand with repulsed incertitude before the Abu Ghraib images? Much has been made of Ballen’s hypnotic work and his vortex of image and dis-logic. I wouldn’t suggest he is a mystic seer, but if some sort of visual, global Zeitgeist exists, I would suggest that Ballen tapped it. Few commentators have readily acknowledged this visual convergence. Why? Strange forces.
We have argued the ethics and presence of torture in non-photographic media, but have we failed to satisfactorily take up issues surrounding the aesthetics of torture in photography?
Maybe all the visual culture theorists were worn out and distracted after the publication of the Abu Ghraib images; maybe I am writing this a year or two too late; maybe visual similarities aren’t enough for a water tight hypothesis? But, you must admit the smudging and blurring of faces is further provocation toward comparison and spinal shudders.
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There are some amazing resources online for Roger Ballen. The indubitable Lens Culture has a 25 image gallery and 18 minute audio interview.
Heather Morton compares his Ballen’s with Ralph Meatyard, Joel Peter-Witkin and Tim Roda.
Colin Pantall does the best blogosphere survey of Ballen’s aphorisms, antics and work.
Hot Shoe has a solid review of the Shadow Chamber book.
The V&A offers three very short audio snippets by Ballen.
And, these are the best of the articles provided by Ballen’s own website – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
Prison Photography 