Roger Ballen: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness

Roger Ballen's photo of Selma Blair in a Givency Haute Couture hand-felted-wool jacket
with Vulture feathers and trapped-feather-embroidered Georgette dress.

There is something of The Addams Family about Roger Ballen’s photographs, a grotesquery that is also darkly funny. The comparison doesn’t end there. The Addams Family is only a family by default. Before Hollywood, which press-fitted Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the freakish family into a suburban straightjacket, they were simply anonymous cartoon characters.

Dreamt into life by Charles Addams, they first appeared in The New Yorker, in 1938 Over the 50 years that Addams drew for the magazine he continually returned to his impromptu family to articulate his macabre vision. Which is not dissimilar to how Roger Ballen does things.

Over the past decade this geologist cum photographer has often worked with the same people, a cast of downtrodden figures from South Africa’s colourless underclass. Many of them live in Pretoria, others in his native Johannesburg. Collectively they have offered the socially awkward photographer the necessary intimacy to make his unsettling pictures.

Remarking on his process to the Village Voice, Ballen likened his method to that of a well-known Swedish filmmaker: “I consider myself like Ingmar Bergman in some ways, working with the same crew and the same actors year after year.”

His cinematic metaphor was given an uncanny literalness recently when The New York Times asked him to do a Ballen fashion shoot for their T Magazine supplement. The offer, which required Ballen to substitute his usual photographic habitats for a New York location, came with an inducement: the actress Selma Blair would model for him.

“Trish, what movies did that woman I photographed appear in?” the photographer shouts to his secretary.

Ballen is in his Parktown office, which he uses to both run his geology company and warehouse the black and white photographs he makes.

“Legally Blonde and The Fog,” his secretary shouts back. I can tell from his expression that he has seen neither.

After replying in the affirmative to the newspaper’s request, Ballen was emailed a selection of pictures – potential locations for the fashion shoot.

“I really wasn’t that excited by any of them,” he says; this segues into an explanation of how he eventually found the right location.

“My cousin, who lives in upstate New York, told me about this place, an abandoned insane asylum, that might contain the type of spirits I would be interested in.”

On a visit to New York in July 2004, Ballen accompanied his cousin to the asylum, located near the city of Poughkeepsie. The place was locked up. A couple of phone calls later and he made contact with its caretaker.

Ballen explained his request, the derelict precinct’s minder finally agreeing to show the photographer through the 80 or so abandoned buildings the following day. The visit yielded an outcome, Ballen finding a space containing the appropriate mix of psychic malevolence, deteriorated texture and available light.

Location sorted, he then rushed back to New York – the photographer needed props to give his shoot that essential Ballen feel, being bits of wire, charcoal (to draw on the wall with), masks, children’s toys and a cast of cute and not-so-cute animals. Just how he was going to use the rat, lizard and hairless Sphynx cat remained a mystery, even to Ballen.

“I never really have a total preconception of what I am going to do. I have to rely on my own sense of imagination to feel out things and decide what I am going to do next.”

The shoot lasted three days. On the first, he took still photographs. These included a picture of a $60-thousand diamond necklace placed alongside a dead goldfish.

The Hollywood model proved much livelier by comparison. Ballen describes Blair as “very professional” and eager to engage with his prompts.

“She had the right kind of personality, wasn’t scared of putting a rat in her mouth or picking up a snake. She felt the nature of the place.”

Not so the entourage of fashion stylists and photographic assistants.

“Most of the people I worked with on the shoot had headaches, and were feeling sick from the place. It was claustrophobic and had a lot of dust. I always said I was quite immune to the place because I normally work in crowded, very difficult conditions.” The explanation is delivered with Ballen’s typically droll New York twang.

Looking back on the experience, his first ever fashion editorial, Ballen is ponderous.

“I had never done a fashion shoot in my life. I never even considered it, to be honest. My photographs are so far from being romantic and sentimental that I think most people would probably run away from me.” He titters at the admission.

A glance through any fashion glossy will bear out his statement. For the most part, fashion photography is about the seduction of the unattainable, thin bodies, abstract hairdos, maximum bling. Ballen’s photographs, however, plunge one into a world of Gucci gone horribly wrong.

Turns out though that T Magazine was “absolutely delighted” with the gothic horror of his shoot. Less so a reader who complained about the photographs and their relationship to prison abuse in Iraq. Ballen bemusedly shakes his head.

“There is humour in them, like all my pictures. And then there is something disturbing and dark in the pictures.”

I forsake the Addams family analogy and ask him to explain the humour element, in his own words. After all, these are not pictures that scream out obvious funny.

“If I had to say what these pictures are about I would call them tragic comedy or dark humour. I would say they are half disturbing and half funny. It is an interesting tension.”

He mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical musings included the assertion, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Ballen’s choice of quote is equally loaded: “When you laugh, you cry.” When I check to verify the quote afterwards, I find that the quote is repeatedly credited to the actor Roberto Benigni.

To be fair, the quote’s attribution is really unimportant. What Ballen is trying to explain is his existential worldview. Also how this impacts on his photography, which in equal measures evoke a world of laughter and sorrow, horror and delight.

The playwright Samuel Beckett neatly summarised this contradiction when he said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

Ghoulish laughter aside, where do these pictures fit into Ballen’s overall catalogue? Are they just a cute indulgence or do they dialogue with his local photographs?

“It is really hard for me to get to the bottom of these pictures,” he responds. The admission is prefaced by a lengthy attempt to speak in words what he prefers to say in pictures. His explanation is, by turns, obscure and definitive.

“It is conglomeration of 55 years of travelling through time, developing a way of being and seeing through photography that incorporates all sorts of aspects of my life.”

Interview concluded we chitchat for a while. I mention an abandoned leprosy mission on the outskirts of Pretoria. I add that it is very close to where some of the people he regularly photographs stay. His eyes light up.

“How do I get there,” he asks excitedly.

(This piece ran pretty much as you read it in the Lifestyle supplement of the Sunday Times, sometime early in 2006, I think.)