Humour, violence and horror in animal-themed photography of Roger Ballen featuring the 12 beasts of the Chinese zodiac and more
- A monkey pushes a pram against a backdrop of crudely painted human figures; a rat is shot with a hand on its tail
- South Africa-based Roger Ballen calls his photography psychological art, and in a Hong Kong show it is contrasted with the abstract art of Andrew Luk
For his new exhibition in Hong Kong, American-born, South Africa-based photographer Roger Ballen has selected animal-themed images that coincide with the 12 Chinese zodiac symbols.
Since most of his photos are shot in South Africa, Ballen has pondered over their relevance to a largely Chinese audience and used the zodiac theme as a “glue” to present examples from his various series, says Vanessa Franklin, co-founder of Boogie Woogie Photography, in Wong Chuk Hang, where the exhibition is being held.
Ballen, born in New York in 1950 and based in Johannesburg since the 1980s, is known for black-and-white photos of poor white people in remote areas of South Africa, who had once benefited from apartheid but, with its demise, faced economic ruin.
Later, he began to experiment with what he dubs “documentary fiction”, and photographed his subjects in dark, disturbing and intriguing tableaux.
In some of my photographs, I tried to link human behaviour with animal behaviour
His imagery is often seen as absurd, integrating the real with the unreal, dreams with reality. But Ballen found that the audience tended only to look at the human subject in his photographs and neglect the other details.