After the publication of "Dorps" (1986) and "Platteland" (1994), Mr. Ballen's interest moved beyond the particularities of the dorps, and, moreover, the particularities of South Africa.
|
|
As he traveled the countryside for his geological work, he became drawn to the country's remote dorps, or small towns, and the marginalized white people who lived there.
|
|
After the S.A.R. reestablished control over the area in 1898, the former settlement was ignored and a new one started, at the present Louis Trichardt. Consequently Schoemansdal was the only Voortrekker settlement not to evolve into a modern town. The archaeological site with traces of the former settlement is currently state property and access is controlled. It is situated on the north bank of the Dorps River at 552 m.a.s.l.
|
|
Lydenburg is a town in Thaba Chweu Local Municipality, Mpumalanga, South Africa. Alternatively known as Mashishing, Lydenburg is situated on the Sterkspruit/Dorps River tributary of the Lepelle River at the base of the Long Tom Pass. The name is derived from the Dutch Lijdenburg, or "Town of Suffering".South Africa Lydenburg has become the centre of the South African fly-fishing industry and is an agricultural and mining hub.
|
|
The southernmost stretch of the Mogalakwena River is the Nyl River, known for its wide flood-plain, also known as the Nyl pan (). The flood-plain is now the site of the Nylsvley Nature Reserve, which houses one of the largest single ecosystems in South Africa for aquatic birds.Hydrological and hydraulic modelling of the Nyl River floodplain (PDF) Retrieved 18 March 2012. The Sterk, Mothlakole, Dorps, Rooisloot, Groot Sandsloot, Matlalane, Seepabana, Pholotsi and Thwathwe, are tributaries of the Mogalakwena.
|
|
Hydrological and hydraulic modelling of the Nyl River floodplain The Nyl plain becomes seasonally flooded and is full of reeds and other aquatic plants. It is known as Nylsvlei, from the word vlei usually applied to intermittent lakes, for the main course in its midst flows northeastwards very slowly. Further on it bends northwards as the north-leaning gradient of the river tilts to a sharper angle. Finally the Nyl becomes the Mogalakwena River shortly before the Dorps River joins the right bank of the stream.
|
|
The project was explored in a 1986 programme by the South African Broadcasting Commission, with an episode entitled Dorps (1986). The poor white came to the fore in Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994). Here, Ballen presented tragic portraits of these people, who were facing political and economic anguish at the demise of an Apartheid system specifically designed to elevate them and guarantee government employment. As psychological studies of "character archetypes", the photographs were described by the photographic critic, Susan Sontag "the most impressive sequence of portraits [she'd] seen in years".
|
|
Ballen's early street photography and the psychological portraiture of Boyhood, Dorps and Platteland was influenced by the work of Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and Elliot Erwitt. The distinctive "Ballenesque" style of his documentary fiction (from 2000 onward), has been said to reference the artistic genres of absurdist theatre, outsider art, art brut, naivism, photographic surrealism and the photographic grotesque. He has also said to have been influenced by a wide range of other literary artistic/philosophical work, such as that of Beckett, Kafka, Jung and Artaud. Robert Young coins the term "Ballenesque" to refer to the unique qualities of Ballen's work that mark and identify it as his own.
|
|
These travels also spurred on his first photographic book entitled Boyhood, which was a series of universal, iconic images of boys that Ballen had encountered while seeking to recreate his childhood in the adventure of travel. Disillusioned by the idea of commercial photography, Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, where he received in PhD in Mineral Economics in 1981. He permanently settled in Johannesburg in 1982, where he worked as a self-employed mining entrepreneur until 2010. This profession took him into the South African countryside in which he travelled to remote small villages called "dorps" and rural areas referred to as the "platteland", in which he photographed the marginalized whites who once privileged from Apartheid, but who were now isolated and economically deprived.
|
|