Outland is the culmination of almost twenty years of work for artist-photographer Roger Ballen and amounts to one of the most extraordinary photographic documents of the late twentieth century. Beginning with the small ´dorps or villages of rural South Africa, the subject of Ballen´s photography moved on in the late 1980s and early 1990s to concentrate on their inhabitants: isolated rural whites, scarred by history, in the process of losing the privileges of apartheid which had provided them with livelihoods and sustained their identity for a generation. The results wereshocking, both powerful social statements and disturbing psychological studies. Ballen´s characters act out dark and discomfiting tableaux, providing images which are exciting and disturbing in equal measure. One is forced to wonder whether they are exploited victims, directly colluding in their own ridicule, ornewly empowered and active participants within the drama of their own representation.
