Roger Ballen Quotes

The pictures are of a psychological culture, a Jungian culture, if you will. It emanates from my own psyche ... It's a hard place to get to, honestly. It has taken me many years to get to that place and to define it visually.

[My] goal as an artist is to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

In the end, I believe that the most important influence on my aesthetic has been the photographs I have taken.

Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive ...

Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

I never think about a photo before I start it. I try to let my mind relax, and then when I get there I do it.

I never prepare a speech. I never think when I give a speech, except for "don't embarrass yourself or others", meaning "remember the names of the people you have to thank".

When you go searching, you never know what you will find.

Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.