Roger Ballen was born in New York City in 1950 and has lived in Johannesburg South Africa for almost 30 years.
Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen’s photography moved on in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to their inhabitants; through the late 1990’s Ballen’s work progressed. By the mid 1990’s his subjects began to act where previously his pictures however troubling fell firmly into the category of documentary photography, his work then moved into the realms of fiction.
His third book Outland produced in 2000 was the result. In the fall of 2005, a new book was published, entitled: Shadow Chamber. The recent photographs focus on the interactions between the people, animals, and or objects that inhabit Ballen’s unique image space – the shadow chamber. The humans and animals appear isolated, estranged and lost, yet strangely empowered at the same time. The rooms are unsettling and strange: their walls are covered with scribbled drawings, stains and dangling wires, the floors are strewn with bizarre props and artefacts. Dogs, rabbits and kittens wander into the frame or are stuffed into unlikely containers. Figures hide away in boxes, crouch behind overstuffed sofas and squat with their shirts pulled over their heads. The resulting images are surreal and intriguing, and powerful disturbing psychological studies.
Shadow Chamber enters into a new realm of photography—the images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs.
Ballen regularly shows his work in galleries and museums around the world, and his photo¬graphs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

He has won numerous awards, including the prize for Best Photographic Book of the Year at the PhotoEspana festival in Madrid in 2002 and was named Photographer of the Year at the inaugural Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles in France in that same year. There has been a traveling exhibition of the works from Shadow Chamber and Outland in important venues worldwide like the Atlanta College of Arts – Atlanta, the Berlin Biennial – Berlin, the Bibliothèque National – Paris, the Museum voor Fotografie – Antwerp, the Oliewenhuis Art Museum – Bloemfontein and the Sasol Art Museum – Cape Town.