South African photographer
of American origin born in 1950, Roger Ballen, through his work, goes beyond the documentary perspective that he first seems to have adopted.

Hovering between the portrayal of a tragic vision and the capture of the ridiculous, nonsensical, fleeting instant, he creates a universe comparable to that found in the texts of Samuel Beckett or Antonin Artaud, or in certain paintings by Francis Bacon or Jean Dubuffet.

His conception of photography led him to explore the darker corners of the soul, to picture a “dark place, strange, ambiguous yet at the same time comic […] a place everybody can identify, without being able to locate it precisely”.

Roger Ballen’s work portrays characters he met in South Africa during his missions as a geologist. But for him, shapes are just as fundamental as people.

The origin of the aesthetics worked out by Ballen over the years is illustrated through the way he directly captures reality, while at the same time drawing on pictorial references.

The image has no vanishing line and is included in a square format. It is constituted of successive planes, closely resembling pictorial flat tints.

Iron wires and electric wires, constantly found in Ballen’s works, tiwt and turn cross the images, assemble to form volumes or cylinders, orient the viewer’s eye toward graffiti, drawings, characters or entrap them as in a cage.

Ballen’s universe is close to that of Becket, where real space becomes a space "where there is no real clarity, no stable verticality, no solid grounding, but always these tilted things sliding off into an endless landslide".

With its one hundred and fourteen photographs, the exposition Roger Ballen,
In the Shadow Chamber is intended to bring this photographer, well known in the Anglo-Saxon world, to the attention of a wider public. He won the Rencontres internationales de la photographie d'Arles award in 1995 and will
be exposed in Germany and in Spain in 2006.

From 21February to 21 May 2006
BnF– site Richelieu - Galerie de photographie
58, rue de Richelieu, 75002 Paris, France
Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM
On Sundays from 12:00 to 7:00 PM
Closed on Mondays and bank holidays
Entrance fee: 7 €, reduced rate: 5 €