The route that Roger Ballen has taken to making the work featured in Shadow Chamber provides the beginnings of an explanation of its frankly peculiar character.

Son of a Magnum picture editor, Ballen bought his first Nikon when he was 18 and began to make photojournalistic work. He then studied psychology at Berkeley and began to travel. He published his first volume of photographs, Boyhood, in 1979. But then his career took an unexpected turn.

He gained a Ph.D. in Mineral Economics of all things, from the Colorado School of Mines. He relocated to South Africa where he became a successful mining entrepreneur. But in his travels to outlying and often economically crushed areas of South Africa, Ballen never forgot his photographer’s instincts, or apparently, his camera.

His photographs were at first primarily documentary but gradually they began to incorporate psychological studies of the individuals that he encountered. Then, as this volume explains, “his relationship with his subjects changed from one of observation to collaboration.” This working method produced the celebrated volume Outland in 2001, and now this new book, Shadow Chamber, published by Phaidon.

The images here—71 of them, presented as full-page plates over ten inches square—are confrontational and unsettling. They appear to have been made in bare dirty rooms (in his introduction the late Robert A. Sobieszek calls them ‘cells’) that have smears and stains on the walls and floors. They are occupied by adults and children and the objects and animals with which they have surrounded themselves.

These people rarely look at the camera, but when they do, it is to glare at it or stare mouth agape. They often look ill or dimwitted, wrap themselves in blankets or outsize clothing, or hide behind things. Equally often they wear masks or boxes on their heads. Children lie on the floor as though terrified or unconscious. Pictures or patterns are scribbled everywhere, and objects—lengths of bent wire, a manacle, toys, and plants—interact with one another and with their human and animal counterparts to produce macabre and often upsetting arrangements.

The book calls them “distinctly theatrical … tableaux.”

Photojournalism this is not, but Ballen maintains something of the photojournalist’s neutrality which, given the arch artificiality of his imagery, lends these pictures a callousness that increases their oddness.

Sobieszek’s introduction quotes Ballen saying that his “goal as an artist is to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision. The meaning should be layered and reveal an aesthetic that is as ambiguous as it is mysterious.” Shadow Chamber demonstrates Roger Ballen doing precisely that.