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Input: After 50 prolific years spent producing masterful black-and-white photographs   Roger Ballen  is ready to take  his  place as a master of the medium.
The past few years have seen major moves from the American-born  South African–based artist.  He  earned  his  own wing of Cape Town's Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art  after the Roger Ballen Foundation contributed the largest financial donation from a foundation the brand-new institution has seen yet. Outside of photography   he 's gone from directing Die Antwoord music videos to  his  own short films. With a new retrospective monograph  Ballenesque  out October 10 from Thames & Hudson  Ballen declares for all the world to hear that  he  is an icon.
Ballenesque opens with an essay by historian and cultural critic Robert J.C. Young. In it  Young begins to define the mesmerizing  "instantly recognizable" quality of Ballen's images  which he variously calls "prehensile portraits " "aleatory assemblages " "windowless walls " and "dark junctures of disjunction." When Young introduces these cornerstones of  Ballen 's style  he writes  "We isolate four; you  the viewer of the photograph  may add a fifth to complete the secret."
The rest of the book is a guided tour through  Ballen 's work  complemented by 50 pages of the artist's own anecdotes  autobiography  thoughts on technique  and philosophy. It all starts with blurry family portraits  Ballen  shot with a Mamiya camera  he  bought at 13 years old.  He  shares the first photo  his  that  he  really liked  a picture of a dead cat on the side of the road.
As  he  got older   he  became a documentarian of 60s and 70s counterculture  from grimacing Vietnam War protesters to carefree nudists at Woodstock. Many photos from this period in  his  career are shown for the first time within the pages of Ballenesque. By 1979   Ballen  had begun to travel the world  collecting snapshots of kids from New York to Indonesia that would be collected into a series called Boyhood.
When he moved to South Africa   Ballen  became fixated on the human toll of apartheid.  He  traveled the impoverished South African countryside as a geologist  but photographed the people and places  he  saw along the way.  He  collected these images into the two series that made  him  famous  Platteland and Outland.
Also debuting in the new monograph are Ballen's paintings from the 1970s  which informed  his  abstract photography in Asylum of the Birds and The Theater of Apparitions. "It was exciting to put those paintings in the book "  he  said. Many of the paintings were lost when  his  father cleaned them out of their childhood home  but the ones that survive have been documented for Ballenesque. "I didn't paint for 30 years  but in a way these set the foundation for my later work."
By the end of the text   Ballen 's work seems to exist  like one of his paintings  largely within his own mind. "From about 2002 onward  you rarely see a human face in the photos "  Ballen  said.  His  current project  teased in the final pages  is called Ah Rats. Now the vermin that have infested the edges of  his  work for years are at its center. In January   Ballen  art directed Die Antwoord's video for "Tommy Can't Sleep " which is full of the rats that are on his brain.
 Ballen  still walks Johannesburg looking for places to take pictures for around five hours a day.  He  spends the rest of  his  time with  his  family  administrating the Roger Ballen Foundation  and tending  his  collection of more than 100 pets. "There's rats  snakes  chickens  ducks  lizards  rabbits  spiders  doves  pigeons  crows  mice "  he  rattles off. Around 10 percent have names  including a bird named Icarus and a rat named Stoffel.
Icarus  Stoffel  and  Ballen 's Johannesburg home are far from the roiling American political scene  but  Ballen  has some advice for young artists trying to distinguish themselves in a photographic era he describes as "amorphous" compared to when he cut his teeth.
Ballen is quick to clarify that he doesn't mean photographers should risk physical harm by "jumping the White House fence" to get a unique photograph. "It's years and years and hours and hours later that you're developing an approach. My pictures are powerful because they access the subconscious mind. 'On the line' can mean psychological  as well as physical." Years spent paying attention to places and people others would rather ignore are how  Ballen  put  himself  on the line. As a result   his  photographs of outsiders help the rest of us look inward.

Unearthed Photos from Roger Ballen's Nightmarish Archive