lens culture: Roger Ballen Interview (link)
Roger Ballen Interview (partial notes)
- During other work he found the objects and archetype people that he’d come to work extensively with. A gradual building up of and continuity of content.
- I guess you choose the photographs that have the most heightened essence, the most integrated essence, the most piercing essence, the most tense essence. That’s the picture you look for.
- These pictures are from an afternoon. I always work in the afternoons. In the morning I do administration, and do a bit of my other work, the geology work. I usually start working at 12, 12:30 in the afternoon and finish my 5.
- When I go to take a picture, I never think about what I’m going to do that day. I have no idea. I try to put it together as I enter the space. I think in photography you really can’t predict too much. You can’t predict how various things are going to interact in a microsecond. And that’s proven by the fact that you might take 100 pictures and they are all different.
- You can set things up but that doesn’t mean that the reality will not change.
- The most philosophical, crucial point that photography makes, related to the human condition, or the life condition, is that nothing in time is ever the same.
- More than anything else you look for an aspect in people, or have a particular way of seeing people through the camera. … Ultimately what you’re seeing is a way of seeing, a way of interpreting the human sensibility, the human interior. … That’s my style.
- It’s the way you interpret reality, it’s the way you see it, the way you think, the way you transform that reality by who your are. That’s what people don’t understand about photography. They think that the camera is an objective tool, it’s no more an objective tool than a pencil is when you draw something.
- By the time I was 18 I had 10 or 15 years of being around photography, of seeing it. … I remember the first time I went out there and just tried to take pictures, it just felt like a total release. It just felt like magic and I was hooked on it from day one.
- I think one of the things over the years, as I look back upon it, say to myself well this played a crucial role in my development there are a few things that I think about other than that early childhood experience. The first thing is that I’ve been doing it, I’m 58 years old now, I’ve been doing it just year after year after year, just plodding along, in my own way you know. Never really stopping. … It’s something that I’ve been very dedicated to, I’ve been very disciplined and worked very hard at it, for year after year after year I’ve been at it and I’ve never really given up. There have been periods when I didn’t do as much, but it’s been something that’s been obsessing me all these years. I think that’s played a very important role.
- The other thing that I think played an important role is living in South Africa. I never sold any pictures till I was 50 years old. I’d been doing photography for 30 or 40 years by then. I still live in a very isolated environment and I wasn’t really affected by what was going on with other people, or other galleries. I just worked according to my own needs, my own interior, and wasn’t distracted with the latest work, with what was selling. I think that it all had to come from myself.
- The third thing is that I’ve had another career all my life, and I never, never do commercial photography. I’ve always supported my photography, in good times and bad times through my other work. I’ve never seen it something that I’d make money out of or do anything but take it for my own pleasure and I think that played a very strong role because I’ve always worked for myself in my geology, I went out and tried to find mineral deposits all over Africa, I had my own time and my own space to a degree, I didn’t have to be at a nine to five job so I was able to do this year after year on my own time.
- On audiences. I never thought of it, because I just did it as a hobby. The things is that if you think about it, the photography business or market jumped sky high in the mid 90s. Up till the mid early 90s there wasn’t much of a market. There wasn’t any good galleries or museums showing photography on a substantial scale, there wasn’t much other there in a way.
- …
- He then talks more about his use of flash, and the resulting ‘violent’ photographs as a reflection of the extreme violence of human kind.
Posted 2 years ago
