Shadow Chamber

by Ballen, Roger; Sobieszek, Robert A

• ISBN13: 9780714847924
• ISBN10: 0714847925
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-04-01
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

Since the late 1990s, Roger Ballen's work has moved away from the category ofocumentary photography and into the realms of fiction. Though he continueso portray people on the fringes of South African society, his subjects begano act out dark and disconcerting tableaux, providing images that are asxciting as they are disturbing - undermined by flashes of dark humour.allen's most recent images are painterly and sculptural in ways notmmediately associated with photography. There is no digital imaging involved:verything shown has happened in front of the camera. The images areompletely honest, and yet they are also fabricated. In "Shadow Chamber",allen focuses on the interactions between the people, animals and objectshat inhabit his unique image space. The rooms in his pictures are actuallaces that we know to exist, yet they are made unsettling and strange,ogical yet utterly impossible. The human and animal beings in Ballen'shotographs appear isolated, estranged and lost, yet strangely empowered athe same time. In 2002, Ballen was named Photographer of the Year by

Author Biography

Robert A Sobieszek (1943-2005) was Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he served in various curatorial positions, including Director of Photographic Collections at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He organized over 50 exhibitions and authored 10 books, including LACMA's Robert Smithson: Photo Works and The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

Born in New York City in 1950, Roger Ballen has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for almost 30 years. The son of a picture editor at Magnum, he worked as a geologist and mining consultant before starting his own 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 previous book Outland (2001), also published by Phaidon, is indisputably one of the most extraordinary photographic documents of the late twentieth century.