Ballen is too intelligent to be caught up in this measuring and quantifying of imagined freedoms and myths of meritocracy. (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
The Divided Self
It’s a strange thing to have a person, name, place or thing named after you. Romulus, for example, the eponymous founder of Rome, was allegedly born of a virgin, raised alongside his twin by a wolf, and murdered his brother shortly after the two of them established their own city on the hills overlooking the Tiber River. To be Roman then, is not only to be of Rome, but to pledge some kind of tacit allegiance to the leader nurtured by a kind Canis lupus.
Even stranger then when the thing named after you, can only be used to describe you, your style, your way of navigating the world. This can lead to many misreadings. Or rather, incomplete readings. How does one assess the artistic and cultural merit of a work or movement if all its parts can only be measured in relation to themselves?
Enter Roger Ballen, quite frequently described as the 21st century photographer most committed to making visual the more grotesque parts of the mind. Ballenesque work is shadow work. A dedication to becoming familiar with the dark parts of ourselves. The parts of ourselves we would rather pretend do not exist. Choatic. Disturbing. Difficult to look at and acknowledge. His work is often associated with R.D Laing and anti-psychiatry.
RD Laing is easily the most well-known psychiatrist to come of out Scotland. Arguably, the most controversial. Known as the high-priest of psychiatry, Laing’s boldest move was an experimental “safe haven” opened at Kingsley Hall in the east end of London, in 1965. The anti-institute was underpinned by the idea that madness was a “self-healing journey”. Raised in the dark ages of psychiatry; lobotomies, padded cells, electric shock treatment without euthanasia, Laing looked for less barbaric attempts at healing, questioning fundamentally, what it means to be determined “mad” or “crazy”. He said he wanted "to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible", describing insanity as “a perfectly rational response to an insane world”. He is read as one of the biggest references of Roger Ballen’s photography and drawings.
A student at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 70’s, Ballen was psychology student at the beginning of the decline of Laing’s reputation. Laing went from “maverick” to “madman” after a series of controversies. At least two people, buzzing off LSD, jumped off the roof of Kingsley Hall. The most famous Kingsley Hall resident, painter and writer Mary Barnes, regressed to infancy for a time, smearing the walls with her faeces, squealing for attention and being fed with a bottle. She later became a renowned artist, poet and, in 1979, the subject of a play by David Edgar.
“The issue of Laing brought up a number of very important points,” explains Ballen on the other end of a Zoom call. He looks more benign than I would imagine. Keen to talk, if only just a little media weary. “The first point that stuck on my mind was the issue around normality. What does this society mean by normality? And if you go back 50 years in the late 60’s in America, was it normal that a particular country, whether it was American or any other country was dropping bombs on each other and this was considered the proper behaviour.”
“The other issue was the whole concept of Divided Self. It’s partly a Freudian concept, but the concept is that [in] people’s state of consciousness, there’s a chasm. A gap between the inner side, the feelings and what people portray of themselves, and how we see reality and explain our purpose on the planet. So, these are things that had a deep influence on me that I carried through for the rest of my career.”
But Ballen had already been thinking deeply about these ideas. Exposed to alternative thinking from a young age by his gallerist mother, Ballen was already reading into theatre, psychology, sociology, theology and poetry. He holds a Phd in geology. An honorary PhD in art, a master’s degree in geology, and an undergrad in psychology.
The Divided Self is also the title of Laing’s first published book, written when the psychiatrist was only 30. Summarised briefly, The Divided Self argues that abnormal family relationships can sometimes result in the development of “ontological insecurity” in a child which can later evolve into psychosis. An NCBI article explains it as such: “The “self” of the child cuts itself off from other people and starts to relate only to itself so that it can maintain its identity and protect itself from external danger. The self comes to hate the world but also feels guilty because it thinks it does not deserve to be alive. The self may then attempt to destroy itself—or may split and then relate only to its false self (the self that complies emptily with the world). In psychosis the self can disintegrate into several parts or subsystems, which persecute what is left of the real self. In the end the self may no longer exist at all, but only what one patient poetically described as “the ghost of the weed garden.”
It is not incredibly dissimilar to WEB Du Bois’ social theory of Double Consciousness, which describes the internal conflicts and split identities experienced by black people in oppressive, white supremacist societies. Originally termed to explain “a source of inward ‘twoness’ putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society”, this social lens has more recently been expanded to other situations of social inequality, more specifically, women living under patriarchal conditions.
In Strivings of the Negro people, published by The Atlantic in August 1987, Du Bois writes: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
It is this state of being “torn asunder”, a valid reaction to a cruel world, that interests Ballen, in the same way it interested Fanon and Du Bois, albeit to vastly differing ends. Where Ballen critiques the ways of the world and how they cause psychological, he stops short of calling them by their names, of implicating whiteness and its violence.
“I was more interested theoretically in psychology,” he explains. “I really didn’t have an interest in practicing it on a day to day basis. It was something, at the time it was a means of exploring myself really and rather than finding an acceptable career. And going backwards, my mother started one of the first photo galleries in America with perhaps the most famous photographers of that time in the 50’s. She was involved them, selling their work and assisting them. And so, I was very influenced by my mother’s relationship with the photographers and with their books and photos they gave her.” By the time he was 17 or 18. It was clear that he had the eye. “A year ago, the New York Times published a 50th anniversary of Woodstock and I was at Woodstock. I looked at my contact sheet from 50 years ago and I found great pictures of Woodstock and I took them when I was 19 years old. I was ready to be a photographer, I had the brain, the high, the vision, and the passion for photography in my teens. And this was established primarily because of my mother’s career in photography.”
His mother, Adrienne Ballen was an editor at Magnum, and opened her own gallery called the Photography House on Madison Avenue, in New York. He attributes her loss to his restlessness. After her death, he’d spend 1973 to 1974 hitchhiking from Cairo to Cape Town. “..that’s how I first got to South Africa,” he says quite matter of factly, and I can’t help but think of thousands of Africans who’ve died attempting to travel in the other direction. ”Then I hitchhiked from Istanbul to New Guinea and the Pacific. I travelled for 5 years from ‘73, 74, to about 77 and then I did my first series. So by the time I was 27, 28 years old I had seen most of the world by land. And during those years I focused a lot on my photography and as I said, I've been at this for 54 years now.”
The desire to understand himself better, and by extension humanity, is almost a dogged desperation that haunted him throughout the 54 years. On life on the road, he says: “You’ve got to remember during those times there were no cellphones. The phones didn’t work. Communication was poor. The roads were in bad shape. Roger had to take care of Roger. Roger had to be confident in Roger, y’know. Roger couldn’t lead Roger to the ocean there and drown.” This is the stuff of basic survival. The primal body in search of it’s simplest needs: food, future and fucking. But from it Ballen seeks, not shelter like a roof over his head, but shelter in the world, in people.
“It was a very important experience for a lot of reasons. One, I understood Planet Earth in its own way because I had seen the whole planet by land almost. And secondly, I remember saying, when I came back to America in 1977, I remember telling my father, I said ‘I think I understand humanity now’. And at age 27 I think I understood humanity in some way or the other because I had lived with every aspect of humanity from Africa to Asia to Europe to the Pacific. I wasn’t going from planes to airports or hotels next to the airport. It was mules and trucks and buses and walking and running and everything in between. And I was isolated in many places a lot of the time, and so I got to understand a lot of things and it was really important to me in every way, probably in some ways maybe the most important experience I’ve ever had.”
In many ways, Ballen is a product of his time, coming into self in the free love hey-days of late 60’s and 70’s. Peace, music, free love and drugs amidst the atomic residue of the Vietnam War. Ecstasy and psychic freedom while America assassinated all its potential liberators. Martin. Malcolm. Kennedy. Hampton. How strange that this time is remembered for its hippies and festivals, and not for the sheer brute force America used to eat all its children. And the children of other places, too.
I ask him if, this many years later, he was right. If the 27 year old Ballen had in fact figured out humanity, and of what value this knowing is.
“Yeah, you know, there’s always a line. There’s always a big line. Understanding yourself. Understanding humanity. Understanding your purpose. I think from the philosophic, to the enigmatic, the poetic to the practical, but yes, you can understand people or humanity in certain ways but you don’t really understand what you’re here for. You don’t really understand where you’re going, and you don’t really understand your purpose. And actually… if you admit to yourself you are living in a state of chaos and confusion, you don’t know whether you’re going to wake up tomorrow, you don’t know whether you’re going to live tomorrow… You don’t know anything so there’s a philosophical way of looking at this and also a simplistic way of saying, well, human beings have certain behavioral traits that are predictable and if you look at human history, history tends to repeat itself for similar reasons most of the time. And being a product of the 60’s when most of the contemporary movements started whether it was gender movements, environmental movements or racial movements, I experienced all of this stuff in the 60’s and so it comes back again and then it will go away again and then come back again and so it’s the same stuff over and over again.”
Of that time, the heady period that began somewhere in the sixties and stretched until just after the Manson Family entered a house in Hollywood and murdered a pregnant Sharon Tate and four other people, writer Joan Didion says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”.
And the stories here are numerous. They are tasked with the heavy work of reconciling a Nikon-armed Ballen who lived, literally through the civil rights movement, with a Ballen who will later be accused of exploiting poor white (and some black people) to make his art. A Ballen who at 27 understood humanity, but then would later go on to make work with one of South Africa’s most embarrassing products, Die Antwoord. But it is not Ballenesque to contradict oneself.
“I haven’t had a problem with this,” he says. “Because in nature there’s no black and white. There’s no good or bad. I don’t have this issue of light and dark. Life is life to me.” And maybe this is the place from which Roger the Rat is born, a place that look into the face of human suffering and still decide that there no such this as good or bad. Produced in Johannesburg between 2015 and 2020, Ballen creates and documents a part-human, part-rat creature who lives an isolated life outside of mainstream society.