sionas‘‘ironicarchetypesofalienationandimmobil-
ity, victims of both political forces and personal cir-
cumstances, defending themselves against economic
deprivation and psychological anguish in a hostile
and unyielding environment.’’ They witness the
crumbling of a system specifically designed to ele-
vate them over blacks and guarantee them govern-
ment employment. Experiencing a backlash of
increased crime and violence against them, guns
are now visible in several homes. A few mixed re-
lationships testify to the legalization of sex between
the races.
InPlatteland, irony stiffens the tension between
the subjects’ hardscrabble poverty and the senti-
mentality they attach to pets, pictures, possessions,
family life, and toys. So too, between their battered
bodies, the dross of their lives, and the gloss of
consumer products and the glamour of pin-ups
fixed to the wall—along with the subjects’ shadows.
This disjunction is also evident between the posed
and composed subjects and the disarray of their
homes, and between the humor some reveal and
their sad circumstances.
These are unsettling portraits in which one senses
the horror of a horrible era. They are closer to the
edgier strain of documentary that gained momen-
tum after the depravity of World War II than to the
sympathetic and optimistic humanism of much doc-
umentary photography up to and including the 1955
Family of Manexhibition. As Ballen remarks, ‘‘I
believe that humanity is inherently more evil than
good and part of my motivation is to force the
confrontation of that.’’ Ballen’s use of hard flash
and the overall grayness of the images, masterfully
printed by his friend Dennis da Silva, formally
strengthen his association with such photographers
as Diane Arbus and, although Ballen’s work is for-
mally antithetical to street photography and the
snapshot, Weegee and Jacob Riis.
InOutland(2001),Ballen’ssubjectsarenotpassive
victims of the lens but expressive actors performing
elaborately staged poses. This embroils them, the
photographer, and the viewer in the bizarre tragedy
of life in which we are all trapped. Graffiti and the
wires that dangle haphazardly in these poorly elec-
trified homes animate both moments and surfaces
with anxious energy. Where in earlier pictures such
elements may have been present by chance, now they
are deliberately placed, formal elements that struc-
ture the composition and intensify the allusions to
Ballen’s ‘‘universal and metaphorical scenarios.’’
Some actors, too, are familiar subjects returning in
varied guises with new props: none of us is ever the
same from moment to moment.
Throughall of this, asin life,runs thelatentcharge
that flows both in the flux between difference, and
within the same. Arguably, it is more in this latter
sense, of the diverse motivations that may stir within
theself,rangingfromtheself-hatredofaflagellantto
the self-love of a Narcissus, that these pictures hold
up before us the mirror of our temporality.GARYVANWyk
Seealso:Documentary Photography; Photography
in Africa: South and SouthernBiography
Born in New York City in 1950. Settled in 1982 in South
Africa and married the painter Linda Moross. With a
Ph.D. in Mineral Economics, he established a successful
career in mining that took him to many small commu-
nities where he photographed the fabric of the land.LEWIS BALTZ
American
Lewis Baltz is a leading figure in the New Topogra-
phy movement. His large-scale photographic studies
of commercial developments in the United States
reflect a detached objectivity. Working within the
tradition of the movement’s iconography of realism,
his photographs of these often minimalist structures
comment on and reflect the corrosive destruction of
thenaturallandscapebypostwarAmericandevelop-
ment. Baltz began his career photographing in the
West and later worked abroad. In the late 1980s he
moved away from subjects that formed the New
Topographic genre, identified by a seminal 1975 ex-
hibition, and into color and digital photography. ABALTZ, LEWIS