I was pleased to meet Roger Ballen when I was in Paris in November but didn’t have a lot to say to him, not least because I was busy drinking champagne and taking pictures. But fortunately my host at that party, Jim Caspar of Lensculture, did manage to sit down with him one morning in a Paris cafe and talk to him seriously about his work.
The edited 18-minute audio interview makes interesting listening. Jim sums it up well in his introduction when he calls Ballen’s photographs “both beautiful and profoundly disturbing“, and there is a slide show of 25 recent images you can watch while listening to it.
Ballen somehow seems to inhabit a parallel universe to the rest of us, one that only occasionally intersects with life as we – or at least I – know it. His is an intriguing and unsettling view, with flash deliberately used to create a kind of dislocation. But you can hear him talk about how he sees it and why in this interview.
You can see more of Ballen’s work on his own web site.
