Roger Ballen

These two images are from Roger Ballen's New Project series that can be found here.

Ballen's earlier work planted itself firmly within the realm of documentary photography, but this more recent work delves into a tactile and fragmented sculptural aesthetic. The visual juxtapositions within his work enter into the realm of the fantastical and remind me of the hyper-real world created by Surrealist artists in the 1920s and 30s. In the above photo, the contrast between the urgency and motion of the outstretched fingers with the heavy and still presence of the severed boar's head are reminiscent of the gruesome portrait of the human psyche as laid out for us in the surrealist film, Un chien andalou.