A Lesson in Ballen Photography

Roger Ballen takes us on a journey through 25 years of his work documenting the marginalised rural communities of South Africa. Here for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Roger asks some of the big questions in documentary photography discussing objectivity and how to assemble the intricate details that tie a photograph together. Ballen’s images have been described as dark, strange and humorous. He discusses the undefined territory between fiction and reality and how nothing is repeatable.