BOARDING HOUSE is over 70 richly detailed black and white images shot in a notorious Johannesburg boarding house, an unsettling exploration of transience, flight and desolation. Ballen's emotionally powerful pictures, meticulously composed, capture a dingy jumble of hanging wires, stained mattresses, discarded toys, and the occasional disconsolate resident. In his introduction, curator David Travis writes that in BOARDING HOUSE, "we leave our ordinary selves behind and...confront a primitive part of the human condition."
ROGER BALLEN is a South African photographer and the previous author of the acclaimed Shadow Press and Outland, which won Photography Book of the Year Award at PhotoEspaña. In 2002 he was named the Photographer of the Year at the prestigious Rencontre d'Arles Festival, and he has had solo shows at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Gagosian Gallery in New York. His work is currently in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. |
