When Drawing Meets Photography... Roger Ballen's 60-Year Journey

[Anchor]

An exhibition is underway for contemporary artist Roger Ballen, who started in photography and has expanded his work into drawing, installation, and video. Visitors can explore how the relationship between photography and drawing has evolved within his works over the past 60 years.

Reporter Kim Gyeong-hui has the story.

[Reporter]

[Roger Ballen Solo Exhibition 'Roger Ballen. The Works: Drawing meets Photography' / Through February 21 next year / Museum Hanmi Samcheong]

In this work, which incorporates drawing, painting, and sculpture, artist Roger Ballen explains the importance of the "moment" in photography as follows:

[Roger Ballen / Contemporary Artist: It's the relationship between various elements that unfolds in a split second. What you are looking at right now is precisely that. It's about integrating other mediums through photography. And photography is generally about capturing a moment.]

Although he has centered his work on photography over the past 60 years while combining it with drawing, sculpture, and other mediums, he has never formally studied it.

He studied psychology in university and later worked as a geologist in South Africa.

[Roger Ballen / Contemporary Artist: Everything you see here is self-taught. I've never studied photography or art. I learned everything through experience.]

Visitors can experience his series chronologically, ranging from photographs of his teenage years capturing immediate reality to works where he constructs lines and forms within frames, bringing in drawings, sculptures, animals, and the socially vulnerable to express relationships.

While he has explored marginalized social groups and the periphery to capture the human unconscious and madness, he emphasizes that finding the meaning of the work is up to the viewer.

[Roger Ballen / Contemporary Artist: I cannot define my work. I can say it's enigmatic, mysterious, and psychological. But I cannot tell you what the work means. This is very important: if I could explain the meaning of a work in words, it wouldn't be a good photograph to me.]

[Choi Bong-lim / Deputy Director, Museum Hanmi: To me, everything is a fusion, but the result doesn't come across in an orderly fashion according to the academic art norms we know. If you ask me to define (Roger Ballen's artistic world) in one word, I would say it's "confusion."]

His works, which capture living creatures that do not move as intended within meticulously composed frames, may thus be deeply connected to a single moment in life.

(Video Editing: So Ji-hye, VJ: Oh Se-gwan, Design: Choi Ha-neul)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.