Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers: Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen: Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers from Jim Casper on Vimeo.

American photographer Roger Ballen has been living and photographing in South Africa since the late 1970s. His photographs have caused international controversy, excitement, and debate ever since his book, Platteland: Images of a Rural South Africa, was published in the 1990s. Platteland was filled with raw, direct, disturbing photographs of poor white people in South Africa whose lives had been marginalized by the Apartheid government. While some critics accused Ballen of compiling a “voyeuristic freak show,” Susan Sontag described the book as “the most important sequence of portraits I’ve seen in years.”

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