His series Platteland, Images from Rural South Africa, showed photos of poor white people who had never before been the subject of a photo series. The photos showed poverty and backwardness, ugliness and isolation in a lost group of people of rural South Africa. After publishing the book, Roger Ballen devoted himself entirely to staged photography, using ‘his’ people to express his own vision of the human mind. “My photos are not about my own psyche but about the archetype of the human mind. It is a very complicated theme because it is about the philosophy of aesthetics and perception.”
After Platteland, many more series followed, which became increasingly more bizarre in character. In Outland, he started to portray scenes with local people. In later series, he occasionally replaced people…