In this week’s episode photographer, filmmaker and artist Roger Ballen takes on our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’…

The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust. Proust answered the questionnaire in a confession album, a form of parlour game popular at the end of the 1890s. The album, titled An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.was found in 1924 and published in the French literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois. Our ‘Proust Photo Quiz’ is an adaption of the original text.

Roger Ballen
Ballen was born in New York in 1950, but for nearly 40 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. It was his work as a geologist that took him into the countryside with his camera in 1981 to explore the hidden world of small South African towns. At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. After 1994 he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg. Over the past thirty-five years his photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark black and white. A style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society became a cast of actors working with Ballen in his series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and subsequently Shadow Chamber (2005). The line between fantasy and reality in his series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred as he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. People were replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by doll or dummy parts or where people did appear it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals whose ambiguous behaviour became crucial to the overall meaning of the photographs. Ballen has made a number of short films including the collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the band Die Antwoord in 2012, which has over 125-million hits on YouTube. He has also taken his work into the fields of sculpture and installation, including shows in Paris, Sydney, Australia and Finland and his installation at Les Rencontres d’Arles, House of the Ballenesque was voted as one of the best exhibitions for 2017.  In 2018 at the Wiesbaden Biennale, Germany, his installation Roger Ballen’s Bazaar/Bizarre was created in an abandoned shopping centre. Ballen also made a related animated film, Theatre of Apparitions, which has been nominated for various awards. In September 2017 Thames & Hudson published a large volume of his collected photography with extended commentary by Ballen titled Ballenesque Roger Ballen: A Retrospective to accompany an exhibition of his work at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, which took over the entire space for more than a year closing in January 2021. ​In 2020, Hatje Cantz published Roger the Rat in which Ballen creates and documents a part-human, part-rat creature who lives an isolated life outside of mainstream society. Ballen has published over twenty-five books internationally and his works are in more than fifty of the most important international museum collections. He still lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. www.rogerballen.com

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018. Scott continues to work as a photographer, writer and filmmaker and is the Subject Coordinator for both undergraduate and post graduate study of photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England.

Scott’s book Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is now on sale.

© Grant Scott 2026

Image: Roger Ballen