Getting in touch with the great indoors
THERE’S a lesson for writers in the life story of author Eric Rosenthal, late of Newlands, Westcliff and Fish Hoek: you can write 50 books and be utterly forgotten within a generation. There’s also a lesson in the story of Roger Ballen, whose photography studio nestles in the man-made forests of Joburg’s northern suburbs. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
Rosenthal’s stock in trade was works of popular history unbesmirched by, shall we say, the “apartheid question”. He died in 1983. Among his many books is Stars and Stripes in Africa, which details the exploits of that peculiar genre of human being, the American, on the continent where humanity’s first mould was poured.
Ballen, an American (like myself) arrived too late to figure in Rosenthal’s book. A graduate of the famed Colorado School of Mines, he established a prospecting company called Purity Minerals and began a great traverse of this land, which brought him into contact with not just buried ore but buried visions, too — images held fast in the bedrock striata of South African society. He took out his camera and excavated them.
“Purity Minerals”— it would have been an apt name for Ballen’s photography studio. His book, Platteland, a series of portraits flat and dully shining as a sheet of lead, dusted with coal soot and reeking of acid’s tang, scandalised South Africa. Here were Dresie and Casie, bat-eared, slack-jawed twins from the Western Transvaal. Here was Sergeant F de Bruin, employee of the Orange Free State Department of Prisons, a weather-beaten, bobble-headed dictator sprouting from a kommandant’s uniform.
‘If you fill your books with facts and neglect psychology, you’ll fade as
fast as a dust jacket in sunlight’
It was 1994. Ballen had published images that were, shall we say, unbesmirched by the democracy question. With that book, “South Africans saw their own monster,” he told me.
In the years since, Ballen has moved from prospector-photographer to diviner. His first South African work, Dorps (1986), contained the critical moment of drift away from pure starkness — an element first unearthed by David Goldblatt — and toward alloys of his own smelting. He was in Hopetown, Northern Cape, photographing a door. It opened; he was invited in. He took a picture, “Pensioner’s Bedroom”: a coat-hook hanging on a poorly-plastered wall, an exposed pipe, a pinup stuck on the side of a dresser. “It’s the moment I went indoors,” he said. “I only work inside now. Mentally and literally.”
Ballen’s books from Platteland onwards have enumerated an alternative 20 years — cross-stitches against the main threads of the New South Africa. He eschews depth of field; his images are great onrushings of flatness, every detail sharp as a shark’s tooth. “The eye sees in focus,” he said, “so my pictures are always in focus.”
This gives a clue about how to read his work: look for motion, made by eyes, mouths, limbs, that give the lie to the stillness. In his latest book, Asylum of the Birds, out this month, watch for wings.
Eric Rosenthal’s books, stuffed like straw with facts, were meant to furnish suburban parlours. I wonder if he would have included Roger Ballen and his outré art in Stars and
Stripes. I suspect not, for Rosenthal eschewed psychological complexity. But if you fill your books with facts and neglect psychology, you’ll fade as fast as a dust jacket in sunlight. That’s the lesson of Ballen’s life to all artists: follow your psychology. That, and beware what lurks, and flaps, in the suburbs.