Outland by Roger Ballen - book review: Photographs that are impossible to forget

Outland is one of the most extraordinary documents of the late 20th century: photographs of whites on the fringe of South African society that are impossible to forget.

Re-released in a new and expanded edition, the book is the culmination of almost 20 years’ work for artist-photographer Roger Ballen. Beginning in the early 1980s by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, by the early 1990s Ballen had moved on to photographing their inhabitants: isolated rural whites, scarred by history and the process of losing the privileges of apartheid. The results were both powerful social statements and disturbing psychological studies.

Through the late 1990s and into 2000, Ballen continued to portray whites on the fringe of South African society, now also in and around Johannesburg. Where previously his pictures, however troubling, fell firmly into the category of documentary, his new work moves into the realm of fiction. His subjects act out dark tableaux, exciting and disturbing in equal measure. You wonder whether they are exploited victims, or newly empowered, active participants in the drama of their representation.

Phaidon £39.95