Monika Bielskyte is an artist who mainly works with photography and video based installations, and is the founder of Some/Things magazine. Monika was born in Lithuania, but since 2005 is based in Paris, France.

Below is an excerpt from her recent interview with the photographer Roger Ballen, whose work has featured prominently in Haider Ackermann’s A#3. The full interview will be available to read in Some/Things Magazine Issue#1: Shedding Snatches Of Song Like Petals, launched in September.

Monika Bielskyte: Dream & reality overlap in your work, & despite the image all being flashed in focus, we still quite feel in the state of not yet being fully awake. The authentic moment is not necessarily the one that is factual but the one that is believed in. Everything seems real & incredible at the same time, something that is part of life yet so rarely achieved by art. Can you tell me more about how do your images happen, about the process?

Roger Ballen: I never start a photograph until I get to the place, I don’t plan a photograph before I go there. It is impossible to plan how things would come together; it is really impossible to predict that moment when the picture works. So I go there & compose the picture, I work with the people,  I work with the place. It is an interactive process, sometimes I tell somebody what to do, sometimes they do it, sometimes just as I tell them to do it something else happens, we work in a small place. No picture is ever the same & I think it is important to see photography no different than painting – each time with a photograph it is like starting with a new canvas & ultimately the photograph is a product of my own vision, the way I see & the way I compose reality in front of me, like drawing with light rather than drawing with a paintbrush.

MB: Since coming to South Africa more than 30 years ago to work as a geologist, you have adopted it as a home both for your family & for your art. What is your vision of this country?

RB: Obviously that I have lived here for 30 years has had a huge impact on what I do & what I think, living here all these years, from the light, to the socio-politic situation that exist here, to the animals, all sorts of things, it has affected me & infected the way I photograph, & the way perhaps my philosophy is, perhaps, in some ways. It’s hard to pinpoint what the environment & what your experience is, what is this & what is that. It is never easy to put these things together. It is important to know that I have never really been a political photographer, nor social-basis photography. Some of my earlier works were more documentary, but I think what I was trying to achieve & express has always been some universal sense or marginalization, some universal sense of alienation, some universal sense of some sort of fundamental existential condition – I think that was more my purpose to take those photographs. My goal was never to make direct comments about South African situation, I feel during these last ten years my images have transcended the country in all sorts of ways.

MB: How has South Africa changed for you, now not as a stranger anymore but somebody from within?

RB: it has changed for some people & for other people it hasn’t changed. I don’t know. The sun, the skylight now is very blue, it has always been blue this time of year, it never rains now, the light is very strong, the air is very dry. I had my office here for 20 years, some people on the street begging,  trying still to live, these people probably live the same way like 20 years ago; people down the street live in the nice houses; political situation has changed here, you know, it used to be a white government, now it’s a black government. I am not too interested to get involved in the politics here, it’s really not worth my energy, it is not my inclination. I get more done doing my photographs than having political discussions, I try to change the world with my photographs not the direct political involvement. Hopefully I am able to stand people’s consciousness with my photography, that’s my means of perhaps affecting society & hopefully in some positive way, whether it does it or not I cannot tell you really.

MB: After all the time being immersed in the environment where violence & harshness both of the human relationships & nature keeps one very much aware of the tragic, vulnerable side of our existence, what do you feel about people’s preoccupations (as seen in art, media etc) in your hometown New York & western world in general?

RB: I think the quality of a lot of the art we see reflects people’s lack of experience in the physical world, it shows their inability to deal with deeper issues, &, more important, existential issues that would come about, that they would experience if they were not so immersed in modern contemporary life & so addicted to technology & sheltered in all sorts of ways. And this mentality is expressed & reflected in contemporary art business, this is what we see. The lack of quality of contemporary art only reflects the inner workings of most people who lo live in the contemporary society, not being able to focus on more profound issues.

MB: Your work, differently than most of the contemporary art & photography, is looking life straight into the eye, without the-now-so-popular escapade into decorative-ism, conceptional-ism, easy entertainment that at the end only helps people to avoid thinking about what is really happening in this world &/or in their own lives. Yet despite being so un-concessional your work is in the biggest art galleries & institutions. Do you feel a stranger among it all? Why do you think contemporary art has become so full of people’s ego, vanity & fakeness & almost completely detached from life’s issues?

RB: I have a very different work than most of artists for all sorts of reasons. As you know I am a trained geologist, I have a doctorate in geology,  have been a businessman for many, many years, an artist for many, many years. I think always most important to me is not worrying about what other people do, but just really try to focus on what I am doing. You can go crazy if you follow what is going on there, you see so much stuff that is so full of people’s egos, vanity & fakeness, as you say it, you can actually give up after a while if you put yourself in this situation all the time & try to identify with what is out there. I try not to get myself involved in it all & I think the one thing that I have probably been lucky about, though I don’t know if lucky is the right word, was living in South Africa. For all these years I have been really pretty far away from all those things, there is not much of the contemporary or a scene here, certainly most of the years I have been living here, there was almost no contemporary art scene, there are issues of contemporary life here to the same degree, but the art business & art world here is very very small, I spend a lot of my time here, it’s not like living in Paris or New York where you are just in it & it’s just one thing after the next after the next after the next, here it’s on much much smaller scale, it enabled me to just focus on my work, not have to compare myself with other people, just focus on what I have been doing all these years.

MB: are there some artists whose works that would have marked you profoundly?

RB: I could probably close my eyes & take 50 things, like what I have mentioned to you yesterday, from looking at Egyptian art, to looking at Byzantine art, to cave paintings in france, to looking at Picasso. I have so many influences, but I am not like married to anybody. When in Paris I liked what Kertesz was doing in 20s, I liked Man Ray’s work in the 30s, I liked Dubuffet’s work, I liked Picasso’s work, Australian Aborigines art, American Indian work. So I know the history of art – I have seen a lot of art – it is all in my mind in one way or another, but I don’t how it helps me to make a picture. I don’t really like to say that anything, really anything, is a final thing to me.

MB: Your main medium is books, can you tell me more about it?

RB: My goal in all my projects year after year have been books, most of them take me four to five years & the book is really my end result of all the work done during this period, I really am book orientated rather than exhibition orientated. It is very important to be able to start something & finish something, a lot of people start something but they don’t finish it. If I work on something for four or five years it is to make it integrated, a very difficult task, but also very inspiring, you learn a lot; creating something is like creating a life on its own almost, it’s a real challenge to do these things & see them through when you actually finish it.

MB: passing from outside to inside in your photography, how was it related to your own feelings at the time? Was it more an artistic choice or a personal one?

RB: I don’t think it was instantaneous; it is always inside at the end. I think even if you are a tourist in Paris, it is always inside, you make a choice whether to take a picture of a sunset or a river, or the bridge, or of your girlfriend or boyfriend; these are all choices that come from the mind, everything we do is an interior choice. The vision what you see sometimes naturally becomes more of a personal vision or a personal style, something that is different from other people’s photography. And it is so that my work, my vision of my world, or whatever that I was trying to create, became indigenous & now when somebody looks at it, it is a ‘Roger’ picture, like a Picasso picture, it’s only Roger who could have created that world, cause that’s what he’s done, he spent all these years trying. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was an evolutionary decision, or not a decision even, an evolutionary effect rather, I didn’t necessarily make a decision to do this or that, I just pictured & pictured. Over a long period of time things evolve, step by step by step by step & the little steps become the big steps.

MB: It is all so much about traces in your work; drawings & cracks on the walls, wires in the most improbable forms, they are almost like characters themselves in your images. Can you tell me more about it? And about so many things that are behind the curtain, behind the surface, behind the shot. Is it harder to choose what will be in the image or what to leave out?

RB: I think you are absolutely right about that. I think people too often just ask me about the people in the place, they don’t look at the finer details in the pictures. Especially in the boarding house, there is a tremendous amount of detail to look at & I think each one of these things, as you say, are characters in themselves, the images in themselves, have their own inner needings. They are all part of the picture & everything in the picture equals everything else in the picture, I think it is an important point to understand that all these things you see have an equal importance, they are all there to integrate with everything else, to create a higher level relationship – if you take one thing out then the whole thing doesn’t work so well. It is an integrated artistic vision that you see – using drawings, using people, using animals, using paintings, using sculpture, using texture, using lines, using shadow, using light – all these things interact inside the picture layer on layer on layer, I think it is not a matter of choosing what will be in the image or what will be out, the problem is to integrate things to create a higher level meaning, I think that is the hard part.

MB: In almost every interview journalists ask you about the choice to do black & white photography. But what I would be interested to know is more about your way to see the world, is it a black & white world?

RB: My eyes see in color, my eyes & my brain, I am sitting in my room & I see in color, but when I photograph I understand the black & white world, I see through the camera a black & white world of shapes & tones, of light & of shadow. I integrate things in the black & white aesthetics, I see the apple red & the sky blue, but when I take pictures then I understand that the apple is gray, mid-gray, not red & I have to integrate that mid-gray with some other grays to create the world of black & white.

MB: ‘The twirling wires’ is one of the most powerful images I have ever seen. It makes me think of a hurricane, or of a whole world descending upon a man, or maybe rather the world inside us, bigger than our own selves, beauty & terror, something that we cannot comprehend & are never able to put into words. You have written to me a bit about the man in that image, that you have photographed him almost immediately after you saw him & that you have learned several weeks later that he was found dead in that very same place. What did you feel then? What does that image mean to you now?

RB: I always say most important images are the ones that I don’t understand, but that reveal something about myself. Twirling wires for me is a very profound image, very powerful image, it’s one of the most important images I ever took. When I look at twirling wires it always gives me something, always says something about my life & always inspires me in some ways, I want to look at that picture because it really achieves something, something that sticks with me, I wish I could take more pictures like that. It has always given me that, so I am never tired of it. A good photograph lives, a good photograph lives beyond the artist, & that is an important thing, & not necessarily my relationship to that person or that place; I think most important thing is the photograph, what is it saying, what is it revealing, that’s the key thing, that it continually gives people the message, wherever they are, over the time, that’s the criteria. Not like that contemporary art idea that you have to read about it before you can understand, in a lot of contemporary art you look at these things & you have no understanding at all what anything is about, so you are supposed to read about them, but when you read about them, it has nothing to do with what you see – that is not my idea about good art.

MB: You have once said there is a monkey behind every face, for you, is it the tragic side of human existence?

RB: I don’t think it is a matter of tragic side of human existence, it is just what we are, a million or two million years of being a human being & a billion years of evolving to this point, & so human side to what we are is only a small part to our personality. Freud said that, & endless people said the same thing over & over & over again, that human being is basically driven by its instincts, by its animal instincts, so when I say there is a monkey behind every face, it is nothing new, we’re driven mostly by our instincts, that’s why human behavior keeps repeating itself, that’s why its very hard to change society, it isn’t a matter of education, it’s just that our instincts govern us. Germany was a very educated society & yet the worst massacre in the history of humanity occurred from Germany & not in Africa, & people always say that bad things always come out from the primitive environments, but it is not true, it is just a little bit more obvious in the primitive environments. I think my pictures actually reflect more on a deeper level of human conscience, on a more animalistic level of human conscience, which society tries to avoid or tries to repress, I think my pictures bring that out, in some way.

Roger Ballen’s confronting photography holds an intensity that betrays deep stories lurking below the surface, subjects with a story to tell and scenes with intricate subtexts. He works in a style that allows and celebrates the untouched, raw details of real life – from the dirtied shirts of the twins (below) to the haunting, grimy backdrops he selected for later images. South African born and based, Ballen has often taken subjects from the remote villages of his native Johannesburg -faces with a unique naivety, coupled with a world-weariness from arduous physical labour and the harsh existence of the Transvaal.

This series in A#3 comes courtesy of Fifty One Fine Art Photography, who’s selection spans Ballen’s work from 1983 up until 2002. The evolution of his work is evident even in the few images shown here, with a move from pure photojournalism to a more conceptual style, with constructed pieces that capture powerful animalistic symbology, such as the ape skull below.

All images by Roger Ballen.