Review of Alistair Whitton for ARTSA

Herewith:

Roger Ballen

I went to the launch of a series of Roger Ballen photographs from a series called 'Shadow Chamber'.

After the launch there was a talk by Roger Ballen who is possibly the biggest fucking idiot on the planet. He talked in kid's terms about his photographs taken in a boarding house and not once mentioned the ethical questions which the photography raises.

I can be for a simple photo/cash exchange when the photographer acknowledges that and takes some sort of ethical responsibility for it, and the subject is made aware of the possible implications of the photography.

Not Ballen who acts dumb.

Here is the opening remark on Roger Ballen's www.

The art of Roger Ballen is impossible to forget. It goes deep. Gets at places we didn’t know were there. Maybe hoped weren't there. It makes us wild. It opens us up to those uncertain, shocking and frighteningly banal aspects of the waking dream, twitching between animal and human, the clean and the unclean, the animate and the inanimate, the lived and the imagined, the natural and the performed. So despite the fact that his early and mid-period works – stretching, say, from the late 1970s through to the 1990s - were made under the guise of the photo-documentary tradition, there was always something else going on, something much sharper, much hotter. Arguably, the dynamic is this: Ballen’s complex artistic vision transforms particular historical and social issues into private, felt, internally experienced matters.

Later in the week I photographed my bed and discovered that the film, which was a gift, was heavily soiled with Fungus.