Roger Ballen’s work has evolved over a period of more than 30 years. His earlier series Dorps - Small Towns of South Africa 1983-1985 and Platteland 1986-1994 are inspired by American documentary and landscape photographers including Walker Evans and Diane Arbus, whilst his later work is increasingly sculptural and dreamlike.
In one square black and white image from the series Shadow Chamber 2000-2005 a boy is sitting on a concrete floor, his head hidden between his legs and covered by his shirt. His right naked arm is holding a fabric dinosaur toy, whilst the left arm is touching the left foot. The child is more like a sculpture than a child in the photograph and its shape is echoed in pieces of iron, that are put together in the form of a spider on the right side of the image. The setup is shot with flash against a dirty concrete wall.
Ballen is creating a reality rather than depicting reality. All of his images are shot inside. Windows are never shown, making the derelict spaces even more mysterious and dark. Like the underbelly of society or the subconscious, where darkness and desire prevails. Ballen is comparing and relating forms and signs. In the specific image, he is connecting the human form to the spider. The work speaks off the mind and to the mind, by creating new relations between humans, objects and animals.
The black and white projection It Doesn’t Move shows a photographic cut-out of a woman floating and turning in the air against a backdrop of a sandy landscape. The cut-out is hit by light which forms a shadow on the background and whirls in sync with the moving photograph. There is a contrast between the cut-out which is flat and dynamic and the static landscape backdrop which has depth and extends towards the horizon. The title It Doesn’t Move point to the photograph as still which is the way we normally think of and see photographs.The works however turns a common photographic subject – a woman on a beach – on its head, and present it as a performance.
Can you tell me about the process of making your work.
I work in the color darkroom with out negatives. I start with a preconceived plan, the steps of which are based on the fundamental elements of the analog photographic printing process: exposure time, aperture and filter settings. Then I decide on an action to perform with the photographic paper under those settings. Here the action was folding. I folded one piece of photo paper on top of another. With every fold I made I exposed the paper.
Your photographs are non photographic in the sense that they resist duplication. At the same time they seem to be exploring the characteristics of photography and photographic processes. What are your thoughts on this?
Yes, they resist duplication because there is no negative and because of the human, hand-made nature of the performative action. I can’t fold a piece of paper in exactly the same way twice. In the color darkroom there is no safety light so I can’t even see what I am doing. Still, photography’s essential nature of being light and time sensitive is emphasised in these works with the progressions of light to dark and an apparent process in time. My practise is concerned with exploring the essence of photography but also with finding out what else a photograph can be other than a mechanical representation.
Your work frames the artist performance, which has to be structured and precise. How is the balance between control and chance in your work?
The controlled part of the making process allows me to set up parameters within which I can explore the possibilities. “What happens when I do this to the paper while exposing it like that”? I consider the chance or unforeseen result to be successful if it is revealing something of photography’s essence in terms of the way the materials work.
Why do you think it is interesting to explore the essence of photography?
I am just more interested in the light and time sensitivity of photography than its image making ability. We know it can make image. What else can it do? What else can it be? What happens when I do “this” or “that”? Exploring photography in the way that I do is exciting and surprising. I rarely have that with image making.
Who inspires you? Do you for example see your work as connected to the photograms that were made by artists such as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy?
I am very inspired by Wolfgang Tillmans. How the subject of his work is the paper the surface and light. I also like his treatment and manner of displaying photographs.
Marco Breuer is also an artist that inspires me. He does really cool things by attacking the surface of the photographic paper. Burning it or scraping it for example.
In the beginning I felt connected to Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy but not so much anymore. They are too far away. They excited me as a student when we were learning about abstraction and Modernism. They are important to the beginning development of my camera-less practise.
What are your thoughts on the viewer in relation to the work?
Pffff! This question! Honestly, I don’t think about “the viewer”. I am the one that has to be happy with it, that has to believe in it. If I have made a strong work then others will be able to see what is important in it and what it is about.
Mishka Henner(born 1976) was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013 for his exhibition No Man’s Land at Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome.
The photographs in the series are taken by Google street view cars and selected by Mishka Henner to be part of a series that show prostitutes lingering in empty landscapes their faces blurred by Google. How are we to understand these photographs? The images are pointing to the issue of prostitution, but they are also doing something that goes beyond the situations that are captured.
The blurriness disrupt my view of the women’s faces. All I see is their bodies, the blur and the isolated landscapes they inhabit. I cannot engage with them as individuals. The scenarios presented in the series are similar and I consider how the repetition of prostitution across time and culture produce the prostitute as a concept. The women work within a practice that is kept alive through rituals and repetition - they are performed and performers at the same time.
The blurriness exist between me, the viewer, and the women in the photographs. The blurred layer is immaterial, like the power struggle that is dramatized in the image. The women have claimed a territory, but through the photographs the territory has been reclaimed by an industry, the photographer and me as the viewer. I see the women in the landscape from a wide angle birds-eye perspective, positioning me as all-seeing and domineering the landscape. The blurred faces not only creates a distance but it presents the women as objects of suspicion. The photographer becomes another player in the performance. His position as a male artist engaging in a power relation with the women and using them as tools in his work of art disturbs me. The photographs pose the question: Who has the power over the space?
The situation culminate in the meeting between me as the viewer and the image rather than between the prostitute and the customer. It is the photograph that is performative and I am an actor in the performance. I am responding not so much to the issue of prostitution, but to the images displayed as art.
Copenhagen, Wednesday, May 29 at 08.45, Posted by Lone
Collaboration with poet Steven Fowler - Follow this link to read the poem.
The text, that is written in relation to the artistic work in the blog posts, should be seen as an approach to photography rather than absolute statements. I like the idea of disturbing the curatorial text and wanted to mimic the way that power is distributed on the internet through a textual dialogue. I contacted Steven, who I have collaborated with before and we agreed that he should use the text on the blog to create a new lyrical work. Here I should add, that the title on the blog point to a visual/textual collaboration we did a few years ago, in which the poem that Steven wrote start out as follows: The action is thus - an icon is painted before us (…)
The poem title what photography is: light, colour and form completes the title of the blog, which now reads The action is thus - what photography is: light, colour and form.
The poem is made up entirely of words and sentences from the blog posts about Qiu-Yang, Gina Zacharias, Boris Mikhailov and Tereza Zelenkova respectively. The textual fragments from the blog posts are highlighted in pink and linked to the poem page. The contrasting colours, blue and pink halt my reading process.
The curatorial text is cut into pieces, pasted back together and presented in a new lyrical form. Although the poem is also talking about photography it seems to be talking to the senses rather than trying to make sense. It has a mysterious performance quality similar to that of the photograph; I can talk about what the poem is doing, but I cannot determine and fix it’s meaning. It’s doing depends on the person facing it and the context of the encounter.
If writing is authoritative, then the poem present the curatorial text as staged and ideological. The dialogue between the poem, the text on photography as performance and the artistic works is playful, yet it is a power struggle. I should add that the image above is from the series Hesitating Silence by Gina Zacharias.
The project title Seven Years refers to the age gap between Trish Morrissey and her sister. Morrissey re-creates family snapshots, as they might have looked if they were shot in the 70’s or 80’s. In the photographs Morrissey and her sibling pose together and impersonate male and female characters, probably from the same family.
Some of photographs in the series explore and present what we might call photographic mistakes. Fingers are clumsily included in a photograph of a girl in a green swimsuit, on the left side of the frame. In another image a boy is crouching, his back against a wall, next to a girl in a yellow dress who is standing straight. Her head and upper body is cut off, by the edge of the photograph. The mistakes, hurtful at times, shift my attention from the people photographed to the photographer, and makes visible the actions of, and interactions with, the person behind the camera. The mistakes disturb the illusion of the family snapshot as as an object and present it as a performance .
The re-enactment of another time, is also a re-enactment of the analog family snapshot. Digitalness has changed the way we take pictures, how they are presented and viewed. If I make a photographic mistake today, I will delete the picture and take another. The rituals that surround taking pictures within the family are alive, if only they have changed a little, but the family snapshot as a concept is still the same.
Copenhagen, Wednesday the 8th of May at 9.19, Posted by Lone
Can still life photographs be political? Qiu-Yang’s work are of photographic studios and rooms, but I mostly respond to them as photographs of photography. One image of a studio setting includes a blue backdrop, two soft-boxes and three red, pink and yellow square boxes, reducing the photograph to light, colour, form, texture and composition. Like many contemporary photographic works Qiu-Yang’s work refer back to the camera and to the processes that are involved in photography. If they perform the qualities of the medium, then it is important to consider why this might be interesting. In Qiu-Yang’s work the matter that makes a photograph is visible and therefore I become aware of the staging or construction that is at work in the making of any photograph. In this way, Qiu-Yang’s photographs are about authenticity, because they attempt to detach themselves from ideology, in order to just present what photography is: light, colour and form. Looking at the work I am conscious of the link between photographyand reality which is historically complex and political in essence. When I visualize Qiu-Yang’s work as performance the photographic space generate knowledge about photography and realism, which is then activated and transformed as I engage with the work.
Copenhagen, Thursday the 18th of April at 15.05, Posted by Lone
There is something dark and mysteriousat work in the photographs. An investigation is happening within the frame that concerns the medium of photography itself. I see that there is no person behind the black hooded robe. Rather there is just a shell that reminds me of the Death. The skeletons are also toying with this notion. They are traces of what was, or as Roland Barthes famously worded the relation of photography to the past that-has-been. Thus, the series explore and present what photography is about and it’s acclaimed relation to death.
The mysticism andotherworldliness also emerge from the dark, symbolic gestures and signs that exist in the photographic sphere, like for example the image of the occult symbol or tattoo on the inside wrist. Rather than thinking of the photographs from the series as related to a strand of occult ideology; they generate their own reality in which alternative systems of belief are allowed to exist. Perhaps the presence of the occult symbols could also be linked to an exploration of the power of the photograph itself, as existing and acting beyond language.
The spaces that exist between images, such as the landscapes and the photographs of the skeletons are left for the viewer to imagine. I realise that in order to make sense of the images and the relation of one image to the next I need to conceptualize a narrative, that will be based on my experience and knowledge.
Copenhagen, Monday the 1st of April at 12.46, Posted by Lone
Katy Grannan’s recent series The Westerns (2005 – ongoing) portray individuals who live on the West Coast of America. Their poses are staged in ways that are reminiscent of the poses that one sees in mainstream photography, yet the identities at play in the photographs are liminal and unfamiliar.
Although the people in Katy Grannan’s pictures are marginalised there is a greater sense of equality between her and the people she photographs than between Boris Mikhailov and the subjects of his photographs. Grannan wants to collaborate rather than dictate. This feeling is partly down to the knowledge that I have from interviews with Katy Grannan in which she explains that her subjects often have a clear idea of how they want to pose. But the idea is also echoed in the image quality. Grannan’s large format images keep a respectful distance and provides a calm photographic space, in which there is room to manoeuvre nd play. In contrast,Mikhailov’s technically imperfect snapshots intrudes on his subjects personal space underlining the feeling of unease and authenticity. The people in Grannan’s photographs are actively using their bodies in order to construct their self image as a contrast to being passively captured. It shows them as strong and creative; as storytellers who performs their idea of themselves through the photographs and at the same time de-construct familiar poses that we know from mainstream culture.
Copenhagen, Wednesday the 27th of March at 18.45, Posted by Lone