The 72-year-old New Yorker who has been living in South Africa for forty years offers a new dive into his world vacillating between the strange and the grotesque. The photographer and artist presents this time, in this exhibition that opens next week, staging where models with tortured faces and stuffed animals mix.

The exhibition explores man's "antagonistic" relationship with nature, focusing on the decimated fauna in Africa, he told AFP. "If you look at the history of humanity, it has been nothing but destruction of nature, destruction of wildlife."

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the number of animals living in the wild on the continent has fallen by 66% since 1970.

From black rhinos to pangolins, many species are now threatened.

Installations by photographer Roger Ballen exhibited at the "Inside Out Centre for the Arts" in Johannesburg, on March 16, 2023 in South © Africa Wikus de Wet / AFP

The exhibition begins with the "golden age" of hunting in Africa from the end of the 19th century. The moment when "the problem began," says Roger Ballen.

Images of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt's Great Hunt in 1909, in which more than 11,000 animals were killed for cataloguing purposes, are being released. The models of two children with safari hats sit in the middle of the audience.

"Flowers and whisky"

Animal heads, human bones, disturbing puppets: "These are pieces here and there of the world around us as I see it," explains the artist.

"The world is not only made up of flowers, whisky and love... Life is made up of positive and negative things."

Installations by photographer Roger Ballen exhibited at the "Inside Out Centre for the Arts" in Johannesburg, on March 16, 2023 in South © Africa Wikus de Wet / AFP

Dressed in black from head to toe, his silhouette slender, Roger Ballen defends himself from wanting to fall into the dark and disturbing. Dubbed "End Of The Game," the exhibition tackles the question of man's action on nature from an "aesthetic" and "documentary" point of view, he says.

In order, however, to "challenge psychologically" and leave "a deep impression on people", continues the artist. Even if it means bordering on the bizarre.

Near the entrance to the hall, a man under a lion's skin, his head covered by the roaring mouth of the beast, holds in each hand boxes from which screaming human heads emerge.

"It's not like looking at a cloud or something on Instagram that you would immediately forget," Ballen said. "If we manage to create a psychological impact, then we have a chance to make an impression."

A leitmotif in the photographer's career. His raw portraits of white South Africans with unsightly features or stricken with congenital defects, in 1994, the year when the country emerged from the yoke of apartheid organized its first democratic elections, had a strong impact.

Photographer Roger Ballen at the "Inside Out Centre for the Arts" in Johannesburg, on March 16, 2023 in South © Africa Wikus de Wet / AFP

The exhibition is hosted at the "Inside Out Centre for the Arts". This place has just been inaugurated in an affluent district of Johannesburg by the artist, who wants to make it a stopover for tourists crossing the megalopolis, on the safari route.

© 2023 AFP