Roger Ballen & Alec Soth

"Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite." -John Szarkowski from William Eggleston’s Guide

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Roger Ballen and Alec Soth. Drawn from disparate locales – the outskirts of Johannesburg for Ballen and the path of the Mississippi River for Soth – the photographs depict marginalized people and places. Ballen’s stark work in black-and-white in contrast with the color-saturated mid-American vision of Soth, but each blurs the line between documentary and fiction in vernacular life.

"Shadow Chambers," a monograph of Roger Ballen’s photographs, is to be published by Phaidon Press in fall 2005. An exhibition of his work is currently at the Museum voor Fotografie, Belgium and will travel to the Dietchtorhollen in Hamburg, Germany and the Bibliotéque Nationale in Paris. A domestic exhibition will open in 2006 at the Atlanta College of Arts and will conclude at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

Works from Alec Soth’s highly acclaimed series, "Sleeping by the Mississippi" were exhibited in the 2004 Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials and a book by the same title was published by Steidl Publishers. "Alec Soth: Portraits" is currently on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. His photography is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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Roger Ballen and Alec Soth