On Psychology, the Subconscious & Meaning on the “Ballenesque” World

Transmission 365: Interview with Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen is one of the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising voices in contemporary photography. Born in New York, he has lived and worked in South Africa for decades, developing a visual language that defies easy categorization. Trained originally as a geologist, Ballen brings a forensic, almost archaeological sensibility to his exploration of the human psyche, digging beneath surface appearances to expose something raw, ambiguous, and often unsettling. His early photographic work focused on the interior of rural South Africa, documenting a disappearing way of life.

As a photographer, he is able to see the mask on everyone’s face. Compelled to journey deeper psychologically for his art, he decided to look beyond that mask. Over the course of his career, his work has evolved from documentary photography into a highly constructed, psychologically charged form of image-making. He has frequently referenced theater and fantastical creatures. Weaving together elements of drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation, Ballen creates claustrophobic, dreamlike spaces inhabited by people, animals, and symbolic objects. These images, often described as “Ballenesque”, occupy a territory between reality and fiction, where humor, darkness, and absurdity coexist. His images, often in stark black-and-white, feature marginalized figures, reflecting a deeply primal and, at times, cosmic view of the human condition.

Ballen’s photographs challenge viewers to confront uncomfortable emotions and question the boundaries between sanity and madness, order and chaos. As an artist, he dissects the world, reassembles it, and leaves the audience to grapple with the uncomfortable, profound, and often haunting echoes of the human condition. His books, including Outland, Shadow Chamber, Asylum of the Birds, The Theatre of Apparitions, and Spirits and Spaces, among many others, have charted an artistic trajectory that explores the darker, often ignored corridors of the mind. His artwork has been exhibited in major institutions, in galleries and museums worldwide and continues to influence generations of artists across disciplines. At its core, his practice is less about documenting the external world and more about revealing the inner one, inviting us into a space that feels at once deeply personal and universal.

Official Site | Facebook | Instagram
Featured image: © Marguerite Rossouw

You originally trained as a geologist. Do you see parallels between studying the earth and exploring the psyche?

As a geologist, I often see myself as an excavator of the mind. I have a vivid memory of One vivid memory that stands out is from South Africa, where I rapidly descended into a mine shaft in South Africa, passing through layers that span millions of years. This experience mirrors my artistic process. Just as I ventured deep into the earth’s strata, so to do I strive to probe the depth of my psyche to create my images. With each new project, I must cultivate a mindset that pushes me to a next level, guiding me towards a place that symbolizes the origin of life, where consciousness first emerged. The challenge lies in transforming these profound inner explorations into timeless artworks and questioning how the journey within can be translated into tangible, evocative images.

His photographs evoke the absurdity of the human condition, and they are also records of a personal psychological journey.

In your early career, you were often associated as a documentary photographer capturing the social realities of South Africa. You are an architect of psychological spaces. At what specific moment did you feel that reality was no longer enough to represent what you wanted to express, and that you needed to start ‘building’ images instead of merely finding them?

This began in the Outland project between 1995 and 2000. It was a five-year project, all shot in Johannesburg, South Africa. Beginning in 1995–1996, my work was still largely documentation. Then around 1997, I started to work with the people in their houses. I would say, “sit here;, stand here there”. Sometimes they would do things on their own. I began to act like a director; they began to act like actors. Sometimes they were the directors. This There was a much more interactive process that came to be called the so-called to create a so-called Ballensque Theater. I started to create my own reality, my own aesthetic, working in these houses and these places with the subjects, mostly people at that time. I started to build on it and to see that I was creating something uniquely my own. unique to me., not just I was not just representing what was there, which is what I had done before 1995.

You became not just a photographer but a theatre director, since you felt the need to interact, direct, coordinate. Is there a point where you feel a photo has failed to capture the truth of a moment? Was the still image not enough anymore?

Yes. Around 1995, I felt that I had to create my own aesthetic–that I was no longer satisfied with just revealing what was there in a commonplace way. This process started in ’95 and has continued to this day. This process never stops. The foundations for the so-called Balanesque aesthetic, which people sometimes refer to in my work, started in the Outland project in ’97, when I started to feel more like an artist than just an ordinary documentary photographer. I started to realize my own particular way of seeing things, and this was a great revelation and inspiration to me. You have to be inspired. My photographic projects take about five years to complete. This process of taking pictures is long, most of my books take around five years. So you have to be excited about what you do, keep finding new things, find ways of being happy with what you do; for me, that means finding parts of yourself that you never knew existed before.

He was hired for his first commercial project shortly after receiving his first camera at the age of 13.

You have lived and worked in Johannesburg for decades. How much does the specific ‘geopsychology’ of that city, its tensions, its history, its light, act as an uncredited protagonist in every frame you create?

One is always a product of one’s environment. to a degree. Prior to around 2000, Johannesburg played a big role because the work still had documentary aspects to it. There were certain people and places which I photographed. , certain places. The, and the country was going through turmoil, so socio-political issues were involved to some degree. From about Beginning around 2001–2002, I began really developing my own aesthetic. It was distinguished by: drawings on the wall, objects, fewer people, many more animals. 

From that point on, the pictures really didn’t have much to do with the political, social, or cultural atmosphere of the place. On the other hand, I’ve been living here for over 45 years, and living in a place obviously has an effect on your personality”, on how you see the world and yourself. So I can’t fully separate myself from the environment. But the aesthetic I’ve developed over the last 25 years is more of an existential viewpoint than a socio-political one. I think, all things being equal, though they never are, I got to a point where I could probably have created similar images somewhere else: , because by that point I had my own aesthetic and didn’t necessarily need the culture around me to feed it.

There is an intense intimacy in your portraits. When you invite subjects to participate in your staged scenes, how do you balance the dynamic? Do you feel you are ‘directing’, or are you documenting a collaboration where they are equally responsible for the performance?

A lot of people ask me this. Since about 2002, there are almost no faces in the photographs, there are more animals, more drawings. People always ask: do I direct the rats? Do I direct the birds? Do I direct the snakes? I see these animals as my photographic ‘subjects’ – perhaps more so than I see the human actors. as more of my These are more of my subjects. In fact, the animals are more so my actors than the people are. , in many ways. 

It is very interesting that the people in the audience talk about the people in the photographs. It always shows me that the human mind is mostly focused on humanity; it has little real interest in animal consciousness, only in its own culture, its own viewpoint, its own domination of the world. Your question really refers to the pre-2002 period, when the human subject played a role. But beginning with Shadow Chamber, around 2000–2005, the human figure played less and less of a role, and other things, wires, drawings, objects, animals, became pervasive. When I was working with human subjects, sometimes it was spontaneous; sometimes I said sit there; sometimes they moved in and out of the picture. It’s very difficult to talk rationally about this, because sometimes it’s just the blink of a person, just the eyes moving, the way the head moves, nothing to do with “open your eyes, close your eyes, look here.” There are a lot of things happening at once. It’s never just a matter of standing there and taking the picture. This never works. There was a very more complex interplay between the people, the background, the foreground, the objects, the drawings: all reflecting and coming together in some organic way. It is not simply directing the subject to do one thing or another never works, because there has to be more complexity than that. That worked before 1995 when I was doing more documentation: “Sit there. There’s a picture of your grandmother on the wall. You look old. You look like your grandmother.” That’s a construction of a picture. But this doesn’t work. I don’t do this anymore. I don’t really direct subjects in any real way. There’s a lot of things going on in the pictures, so you can direct the subject. But there are other things that have to happen to make the picture work.

It is very interesting that people in the audience tend to focus on the people in the photographs. It shows me that the human mind is primarily concerned with humanity; it has little real interest in animal consciousness, only in its own culture, viewpoint, and domination of the world. Your question really refers to the pre-2002 period, when the human subject still played a central role. But beginning with Shadow Chamber, around 2000–2005, the human figure became less important, while wires, drawings, objects, and animals became increasingly pervasive.

When I worked with human subjects, sometimes things were spontaneous; sometimes I would say, “Sit there”; sometimes people moved in and out of the picture on their own. It is difficult to talk rationally about this process because sometimes it is just the blink of an eye, the movement of the head — nothing to do with “look here” or “open your eyes.” Many things are happening at once. It is never simply a matter of taking the picture. There was a much more complex interplay between the people, the background, the objects, and the drawings, all coming together organically. Simply directing the subject is never enough; there has to be greater complexity than that.

That approach may have worked before 1995, when I was doing more documentary photography: “Sit there. There is a picture of your grandmother on the wall. You look like your grandmother.” But this no longer works for me. I do not really direct subjects in any literal way anymore. You can guide the subject to some extent, but many other elements also have to come together to make the picture work.

From documentary, theatre of the absurd, to psychology “Ballenesque” aesthetic touches on themes such as shadow perception, archetypes or fragmented identity and existential chaos.

Your images often feature and blend a dense, claustrophobic clutter of wires, drawings, animals, sculpture and disembodied figures. Is this accumulation of objects a way to mimic the internal state of a fractured mind, or is it a protective barrier?

The relationship between humans and animals is a central theme in my work and carries multiple meanings. I’m interested in the way animals embody the subconscious, that raw, instinctual core of the psyche, the human within the animal. At the same time, animals often act as extensions of human identity and psychology. 

Animals have always held symbolic and archetypal significance, yet at the same time they remain profoundly other: creatures we project into but can never fully understand. In the Ballenesque Balanesque world, there is an oscillation between familiarity and strangeness. In my work, I explore the conflict between man and animal, the corresponding tensions between instinct and reason, the primal and the civilized. Death, instinct, submission, domination–, these are deeply embedded in these photographs.

Perhaps the unsettling absurdity of disorientation of these images arises from the fact that we no longer recognize ourselves in these mirrors. In these photographs, in the structure unpredictable elements are always present: animals move, people blink, shadows fall, light shifts. Sometimes the photographs reveal textures or colors that were not perceptible to me in that particular moment. These elements of the decisive moment are part of the magic of photography itself. Both balance and tension give my images their power.

When I create a photograph, I am navigating a series of unpredictable elements: movement, light, texture, gesture, emotion. One thing happens, another, and another end, that is often outside of my control. I have developed an instinct for when these elements begin to speak to each other, when, despite the apparent disorder, a visual structure takes shape.

Some viewers could find your artwork deeply unsettling. Do you see this discomfort of communication as a necessary ‘friction’ that forces the viewer to confront parts of their own psyche they would rather ignore?

The word “dark” suggests fear, danger, or moral corruption., These associations that come from deep cultural binaries: light versus dark, good versus evil, known versus unknown.

Yet what people often call dark is simply what they do not wish to confront. My work engages the unconscious, those aspects of the psyche that are repressed or obscured. What disturbs the viewer is not violence or grotesquery in themselves, but the surfacing of what has been buried. We associate darkness with fear because it points to the unknown, the unresolved. But darkness is not inherently negative. To me, it represents a psychological truth, more authentic than the sanitized images of everyday culture. I have always been drawn to Carl Jung‘s idea of the shadow. He wrote that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. This is the space my work seeks to inhabit: a confrontation with what lies beneath.

Roger Ballen’s artwork acts as a bridge between the stark realities of documentary observation and the hallucinatory depths of the human subconscious.

Has your relationship with darkness changed over time?

I’ve always been interested in psychology, in what’s been repressed, what people aren’t willing to deal with, the way politics, culture, and society can’t deal with their own weaknesses, the truth that lies around them. We live in a world of repression. This is an important point. I’ve said this since I was 19 or 20 years old; I’m now 76. What is the problem in the world? There are two problems. One is the biology of the mind. The human brain has evolved over billions of years. You can’t stop a dog from liking meat. You can’t change a dog to eat grass or a cow to eat meat. We are programmed biologically in profound ways, and this is very important to understand. A lot of human behavior reflects that programming, however much we think we can change it. The other problem is psychological: most people are not conscious of their deeper selves in any real way. They live in a state of fear, repression, and internal anxiety, and they try to bury this in all sorts of ways, or they project their own problems onto other people and other countries. The real problem in the world is repression, not oppression, but psychological repression. How do you liberate society from itself? I don’t have those answers. I can go back to Freud to the greatest psychologists. But only I can say that I hope my pictures help people come to terms with their deeper fears, their buried identity, and perhaps help them become more compassionate, more resolved individuals. But this is nothing you can quantify.

I’ve always been interested in psychology — in what has been repressed, what people are unwilling to confront, and the way politics, culture, and society fail to acknowledge their own weaknesses and the truths surrounding them. We live in a world of repression. This is an important point, and I have been saying it since I was 19 or 20 years old; I am now 76.

What is the central problem in the world? I think there are two. One is the biology of the mind. The human brain has evolved over billions of years, and we are programmed in profound biological ways. You cannot stop a dog from liking meat, or make a cow eat meat instead of grass. Much of human behaviour reflects this programming, however much we believe we can transcend it.

The second problem is psychological. Most people are not conscious of their deeper selves in any meaningful way. They live in states of fear, repression, and internal anxiety, burying these realities or projecting them onto other people, societies, and nations. To me, the real problem in the world is not simply oppression, but psychological repression.

How do you liberate society from itself? I do not have the answers. One can turn to Freud and the great psychologists, but all I can say is that I hope my pictures help people confront their deeper fears and buried identities and perhaps become more compassionate and self-aware individuals. But this is not something that can ever truly be quantified.

Animals appear often in your artwork. How do they function as a bridge between the mundane and the surreal, and what is their significance in your compositions?

Animals operate on instinct, not performance. They are existentially pure, and that is part of the reason they are crucial to my work. They disrupt our understanding of normality and remind us of something ancient in ourselves. I create environments where their presence can become symbolic. I don’t direct them; I invite them into the psychodrama.

Your series artwork, entitled Spirits and Spaces, represents a significant shift into color. You have long been associated with the specific, gritty texture of black-and-white film. How does the intrusion of color change the way you negotiate the ‘Ballenesque’ psyche and style? Does color bring you closer to the world, or does it add another layer of anatomy of chaos?

After decades of working in black and white, beginning in 2017 I started working in colour. I was concerned about whether black-and-white would dilute my vision. I asked myself at the time, and I was always worried about this: “Would black and white dilute my vision?” To my surprise, it took me deeper into my own psychological terrain. What I discovered is that I do not see colour as bright pigments, but as monochromatic colour: muted, tonal, subdued. In fact, “Does to my surprise, my particular colour palette colors make my images more real, more tactile, more dimensional or more surreal?”

My palette contains desaturated hues complex, not bright hues, which suggest bleakness and decay, while sudden bursts of red or green break through with emotive power. For me, the experience of colour is a deeply philosophical mystery. How do we know what colour another person sees? What is color? It is a phenomenological experience, a way to evoke, unsettle, and lead the viewer more deeply into their own perceptual realities. Simply: the colour added a new layer and expanded the complexity of the vision of the work, similar but different. In a way, it took the work to the next step. Whether it’s better or worse, I can’t say. I would say that the colour work in Spirits and Spaces is more complex imagery. I’ve always said: “If you can define my photographs in words other than enigmatic, strange, powerful, then it’s a bad photograph.” The pictures have to challenge me. If I understand them consciously in any real way, then I haven’t achieved anything, I’m telling myself something I already know. I have to surprise myself. The picture has to expand my own consciousness through surprise but not surprise alone; there has to be a depth of meaning. That’s what’s missing in a lot of photography today: there is a lack of depth of meaning, substance, there is a lack of mystery.

You’ve said your artwork is not political but psychological. Can psychology ever truly be separated from social reality?

First of all, we do not truly understand reality. We cannot properly define consciousness, where it comes from, or where we are going. Human beings live with a profound uncertainty: we know we are going to die, yet we understand very little about existence itself. That insecurity lies at the core of human life. Much of our behaviour is driven by deep biological instincts that cannot simply be transcended or resolved, however much we believe we are rational or in control.

At the same time, most people are not deeply conscious of themselves. They live in states of fear, repression, and anxiety, often projecting their inner conflicts outward onto other people, societies, or political systems. In that sense, the psychological and the social cannot be separated. Everything is interconnected: political, social, cultural, psychological. You cannot separate the sun from the sky or the clouds around it. They are all part of the same reality.

So, of course, my understanding of human nature is shaped by where I grew up, what I studied, and the society I live in. But my primary focus has always been psychological rather than socio-political. I am interested in consciousness, repression, fear, instinct, and the hidden dimensions of the self. Political meanings may exist within the work to some degree, but they are not my central concern. I have never wanted my photographs to function primarily as socio-political commentary. The newspaper can do that better than I can. What interests me more is the deeper existential condition beneath those surface realities.

Looking back at your artwork pieces, is there one you feel particularly connected to? Perhaps one that holds a special meaning? Could you share the story behind it?

There is one photograph that I find particularly important. It was the cover image of Shadow Chamber, shot around 2002 or 2003, and it is called Twirling Wires. It shows a man lying on the ground beneath a giant mass of tangled wires winding around his head. For me, this image deals with one of the central aspects of life: chaos. The wires appear unstable, almost as if they could collapse at any moment. Below them, the figure is wrapped in rough fabric and looks upward with an expression that is difficult to read — perhaps fear, perhaps awe.

I think the photograph expresses something fundamental about the human condition. We are constantly confronted with uncertainty. From one moment to the next, everything can change. It is like an animal in the bush, always alert because something may attack it. We imagine we can control our future, our fate, our lives, but fundamentally we cannot. We do not know how we will feel tomorrow, when we will die, or what will happen next. Human beings are deeply insecure because we lack real control over the world around us.

We create illusions of control through technology, through systems, even now through AI. People believe AI will transform human existence and provide answers to everything, but it will not solve the deeper existential problems within us. We still do not understand consciousness, death, or the future. In that sense, this image is really about chaos and humanity’s struggle to live with it.

What is interesting is that I took this photograph within five or ten minutes of meeting the man. People often ask me whether I know my subjects well. In this case, I did not. Some people I have known for 30 or 40 years and never managed to photograph successfully. I always say, “The camera has no ears.” People often think photography is about telling a story, but for me the image has to go beyond words. I am not interested in illustrating narratives; I am interested in creating powerful visual experiences.

After taking the picture, I left. I bought the man some food and spoke to him briefly, but I did not know him in any meaningful way. A few months later, I returned to the building where the photograph had been taken and asked what had happened to him. They told me he had locked himself inside an old barn on the property and died there.

That story stayed with me because, in some sense, the man already seemed to embody chaos itself — as though he had reached the limits of what he could psychologically contain. The photograph became, for me, an image not only of instability and uncertainty, but of the fragile boundary between endurance and surrender.

Photos courtesy of © Roger Ballen
A special thanks to Sarie Pretorius

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.