B

ROGER BALLEN

South African

Roger Ballen grew up with an awareness of photo-
graphy as an art form. His mother, Adrienne Bal-
len, worked at Magnum Photos from 1963 to 1967,
when she founded Photography House, a gallery
that showed the work of Andre ́Kerte ́sz.
In Ballen’s first book of photography,Boyhood
(1977), he describes how his mother’s untimely death
sethim offona four-year odysseyinsearchofhis own
boyhood, a recuperative journey that broadened into
one of rediscovering himself.Boyhoodsearches for
what is universal in boys: the Tom Sawyerish fantas-
ies and bonding in their play, the stock characters
among their peers, the ‘‘clown, Romeo, bully, sore
sport, hothead, leader, weakling, braggart, tattletale,
mope,do-nothing,niceguy, thickhead.’’Boys intem-
ples, in rags, in motion, in mourning, all are photo-
graphed in spontaneous action or posed, often in a
way Ballen favors for extracting an essence: com-
pressed between the camera and a wall.
Boyhoodtook Ballen to South Africa, where he
settled in 1982 and married the painter Linda Mor-
oss. Armed with a Ph.D. in Mineral Economics, he
established a successful career in mining, which took
him to remote and depressed parts of the country.
Here he photographed the fabric of small towns, or
dorps—the churches, main streets, stores, signs, and

the grain of dilapidating Edwardian columns, rail-

ings, and roof ornaments, which suggested to him ‘‘a

nostalgia for a distant unattainable splendor.’’ In his

resulting book,Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa

(1986), he relates a desire to freeze time, preserving

these environments against modernization, much as

Boyhoodhad sought to still the innocent timeless-

ness of childhood. But it is the inhabitants and their

habitations, particularly the interiors filled with per-

sonal mementos, ornaments, and pinups, that loom

larger than the towns inDorps.Ballen likens his

subjects to the hillfolk of Appalachia, frozen in an

earlier era. Their poverty is evident, and the viewer

suspects inbreeding in the cramped interiors, scan-

dals in the dirty sheets between the peeling walls.

Furthermore, beneath these surfaces lie the in-

grained realities of apartheid. These are strictly seg-

regated towns, conservative and racist, parison with

American photographers of the rural South during

the depression of 1930s, particularly Walker Evans,

Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange.

The tensions that are subtle inDorpscome to the

foreground in Ballen’s next book, Platteland:

Images from Rural South Africa(1995). (Platteland

is a generic term that means ‘‘flatlands’’ in Afri-

kaans, and applies to the dreary region of rural

plains dotted withdorps.) Ballen’s introduction to