Roger Ballen: drawing meets photography

Roger Ballen, who was born in New York in 1950, has been living and working in South Africa for decades, and he is one of the 21st century’s most influential and important fine-art photographers. Roger Ballen’s photographs encompass a span of over 50 years, and many of them exist in a realm between painting, drawing, installation and photography. His provocative and enigmatic works confront viewers and challenge them to come along on a journey into the personal and profound depths of their own thoughts. 

The exhibition “roger ballen.! drawing meets photography” opens at the Museum Gugging on September 25, 2025. Drawing provides the focus of attention in this show curated by Nina Ansperger, and drawing is of central significance to the “Ballenesque” aesthetic. Over the last decades, Roger Ballen’s oeuvre has developed from a form of narrative photography to a body of work that has become increasingly dominated by drawing and also displays an affinity to the idea of Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut. 

Roger Ballen, who refers to himself as an “outsider,” describes it like this: “I have brought drawing and photography into painting to produce a mixed medium image. It has been my goal to break down the boundaries between photography and other arts, taking photography out of its self-isolation as a form.”