As winter hibernation is in full effect, I’ve cuddled up with the work of a couple favorite photographers and found a surprising connection. May I present (drum-roll) a short analysis that creates an unlikely link between the photography of Roger Ballen and Andrew Moore:
South African photographer Roger Ballen is known for work that inhabits a primal psychological space. The Kafka-esque images from Shadow Chamber are desolate, yet filled with visual cues of undeveloped emotional states and unnatural human forms. Ballen’s black and white square images work to create a visual of an emotional and psychological state that symbolize a primal subconscious. Child-like drawings occupying the same space as human-like forms while removing any suggestion of time and physical space.
Roger Ballen, Room of the Ninja Turtles, 2003
While Ballen constructs a rudimentary theater of the mind, Andrew Moore has captured the decline of Detroit with a rough-edged elegance in Detroit Deconstructed. Moore observes the ruins of Detroit through selected color palates and a close inspection of the remaining architecture by working in the traditional large format method for accurately documenting edifice. Although often capturing the effects that nature has had on these defeated factories over time, there is almost always the suggestion of human presence attempting to reconstruct what has been left behind even though this tendency towards ordering chaos isn’t moving towards what most people would term as progress.
Andrew Moore, Lunchroom, Detroit
The photographic work of both Shadow Chamber and Detroit Deconstructed speak of a decomposition as a condition, or perhaps a consequence of living. Both bodies of work intersect at similar points: the creation of order and meaning out of disorder; imagery of disjointed items; and limited color palates, or lack of color both work to reinforce the ideas of a sparse containment.
But where these images are similar in their visual language, their messages are different. The rudimentary visual language of Ballen’s work seems to fill in the blanks left by the (almost cliche) imagery of a broken Detroit. Ballen’ psychological bends suggest the mental state of the people left behind in Moore’s depictions of a decrepit Detroit. Where one body of work documents the physical leftovers of a ruined American economy and abandoned industrial culture, the other creates images of the human soul at its rawest and most basic core.
Tags: photography, visual language, writing
You know, I haven’t seen a whole lot of Andrew Moore’s work, but just these two images you’ve posted here really are an interesting pair aren’t they? The similarities between the emotional content is apparent very quickly, but even the physical content of the two images have a strange combination of contrast and similarities. How intriguing!