Description
The resulting images are compelling and dynamic, existing somewhere between still life and portrait. They are richly layered with graffiti, drawings, animals, and found objects. In a world where photographers seek to avoid definition, Roger Ballen is a true original who not only defies genres, but has defined his own artistic space as well.
Reviews
The asylum can be either a refuge or a place of madness. In Roger Ballen's new book, Asylum of the Birds, it's both.
— Lens, The New York Times Photography Blog
Forever inhabiting the darker depths, Ballen's latest subject is an abandoned house in Johannesburg haunted by a cast of quasi-anonymous refuges and a flock of unruly birds.
— TIME LightBox
Combine[s] the fantastical with the unsettling…Ballen's images tap into a tension that for many, like a good rubbernecking, links the distressing with the entrancing.
— VMAN Magazine
These images explore that moment or place or brain trick where the hideous becomes the beautiful. It's not that perspective shifts from one to the other but rather that it lingers in the balance of both.
— Red Room
Filled with Ballen's stream-of-consciousness imagery.
— The New York Times Book Review
A revelation…Iconography liberated from narratives re-forms itself as wordless poems from the mind of Roger Ballen.
— L'Oeil de la Photographie
Ballen straddles the line between photography and image making, and Asylum of the Birds is full of this tension…To look at Ballen's photographs is to enter into some sort of dream state. On first blush, the images seem grotesque, terrifying even, but as they become more familiar, there is a certain fantastic, magical quality, the jumble of the subconscious situated very intentionally by an expert interpreter of our dreams.
— The Picture Professional
If we're inside the photographer's head, it's a scary place to be. The playful, antic moments in his earlier work are overshadowed by a somber, pessimistic mood—a sense of the world in fragments, spinning out of control.
— Vince Aletti Camera
Ballen is at play all the time…We read these images as those of a sinister jester wreaking havoc on division of fact and fiction.
— WIRED
Strangeness is the language that photographer Roger Ballen cultivates in his unsettling work.
— ARTnews
Ballen sets up scenes that are striking and dramatic…Any collection strong in modern art photography will find this an addition.
— The Midwest Book Review
Ballen creates a metaphysical world that dances the line between dream and nightmare.
— Protoview
Contributors
Roger Ballen
Author
Roger Ballen is one of the most important and distinctive art photographers working today. His previous books include Asylum of the Birds, The Theatre of Apparitions, and Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective.
