Documentary fiction was a term Roger Ballen invented to describe his move away from traditional documentary photography, into a way of working where the world itself become a prop or stage for the stories he finds or begins to open out.
Roger Ballen: Drawings made by cleaning the dirt from old windows and photographing them
This year Ballen was representing South Africa a place he has now lived in for the past 30 years and as this is a blog about drawing I thought his work was a good place to finish my reflections on this year's biennale. If you do work in photography and are looking for someone who treats it more as fiction than fact he is a good person to look at, his early documentary work revealing the surreal in reality, and his later work tapping directly into the the strange stories that emerge from our minds when we allow them to come out.
I was fascinated by his work in the biennale this year because it was using such low levels of technology. He simply cleaned off the dirt from old windows until the light could shine through them and then carried on removing dirt until images began to appear. Once he had made these drawings, he then photographed them, essentially using the windows as glass positives. Well perhaps not simply, the characters he has invented are part of a long history of him using similar characters as players in a self defined drama of his own making. He is very aware of how to make an image that resonates and asks us questions as to what is happening here. Once made these images collectively create an installation, but we only get to see the photographs. The photographs are now the drawings, which I presume the originals of which are still in some dilapidated old building in South Africa. This is drawing with light at its most elemental and reminds us that everywhere around us there are opportunities for image making and if equipped with a camera or mobile phone we have a way of capturing the images made and printing them off for exhibition purposes or leaving them online for electronic audiences.
Photography can as a drawing tool be an integrated part of a process that involves making that doesn't last for very long. Andy Goldsworthy is another artist that relies on photography to capture images that may only exist for a brief moment. Some years ago I watched an artist who's name I now forget, making drawings in water on a dry pavement, as each one was finished he photographed it and then as it dried in the hot sun and disappeared, he would begin another, its damp darkness staining the ground if only for a few minutes before it was time to record the process again. He was drawing portraits, each one a brief record of what are always far too brief lives. The process seemed to me to be an excellent metaphor for our lives and as an art-form it was very sustainable, the only thing that was not sustainable was the taking of photographs, this I realised was being insisted on by his subjects who wanted a silhouette portrait of themselves as a memento of their experience.
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