Roger Ballen, born in 1950 in New York, has developed one of the most distinctive visual languages in contemporary art, in which photography merges with drawing, film, sculpture, and installation. After years of traveling, he settled in South Africa in the 1980s, where he found his artistic voice and shaped photography into a medium capable of revealing what he calls the “black core” of the mind. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, Ballen combines formal precision and compositional rigor with a search for hidden, complex realities. Deeply rooted in the aesthetics of art brut and surrealism, his work reflects both movements’ fascination with the unfiltered and the unconscious.
The so-called ballenesque image transforms disorder into formal coherence while questioning whether chaos or order shapes human existence. This tension gives his work its distinctive intensity — enigmatic, bizarre, and deeply human.

Ballen’s works are represented in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Stedelijk Museum.