I started photographing graffiti walls in the late 1960s. . . . The wall is like the artist's canvas. . . . It's the stage before the actors walk on.
—Roger Ballen
In his early portrait works, photographer Roger Ballen placed his sitters in shallow, compressed, square pictorial spaces. The figures engage us with their fixed, vacant gazes; the scratches, scribbles, and drawings on the walls behind them appear as footnotes to their lives. Ballen's fascination with line--found throughout his work--is further emphasized by his inclusion of twisted coat hangers, stains, and electrical cords, which stand in for the drawn line. His subjects sometimes interact with the objects and wall markings in comical ways.
Ballen uses complex juxtapositions to draw us into a dialogue with his photographs. He creates open-ended scenes with no fixed meanings so that viewers make up their own minds about what the images communicate.
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