For more than five decades photographic artist, Roger Ballen, has shot in monochrome, mastering black and white with a precision that made shadows breathe and walls pulse with unease.
But now Ballen has cracked open the door to colour - not with the bright, cheery hues of a happy selfie-book, but with dusty, earth-toned greys, browns, creams — muted tones, only occasionally punctured by sudden flashes of greater intensity.
The result — captured with the release of his new book Spirits and Spaces (Thames & Hudson, 2025) — isn’t a betrayal of Ballen’s world, but an expansion of it. The wallpapered, claustrophobic rooms he builds — in collaboration with his long-time artistic director Marguerite Rossouw — have atmosphere in a new dimension.
Most photographers venture outwards: they walk, they observe, they wait for life to happen. Ballen does the opposite. He builds — walls, rooms, scenarios — inhabited by dismembered limbs, wild animals, crude drawings, anonymous figures. He’s not a documentarian but an architect of strangeness.
In his new photographs, colour intensifies psychological pressure, turning Ballen’s visions from the already unsettling into the subtly horrific. The muted palette gives the images a haunting ethereality: these spaces feel neither real nor dream, but something in between — an uncanny limbo. The effect heightens the absurdity, the chaos, the comedy and tragedy, all colliding in frozen theatre.
The new photographs aren’t just new images: they’re new atmospheres. They’re grotesque but engrossing, inviting the viewer to peer into memory, trauma, instinct — the haunted corners of the mind. Like a dream or nightmare you can’t quite remember, but that fascinates you and lingers after waking.
The book — 144 pages, 91 colour images — is well produced, beautifully printed, and sequenced in thematic chapters: Childhood, Spectre, Animus, Shadow, Libido, Chaos. The essays that frame them are judiciously restrained, barely in the way, printed in ghost tone.
Ballen stays in his dark theatre but changes the lighting. Colour doesn’t soften the work. It disturbs it further. The Ballenesque has grown — but it hasn’t compromised. It’s opened into a new, disquieting terrain.
