LISTEN - Roger Ballen talk at PhotoEspana

Copyright Roger Ballen

This will be the first of a group of posts related to my experience here at PhotoEspaña. The rest will follow starting next week when I return, but I wanted to get this out there.

After Andrew Hetherington's rousing endorsement of Roger Ballen's speech at last year's NY Photo Fest, I was excited to see Roger Ballen speak last night.

As someone who doesn't believe good visual work should require any explanation and who believes that any reaction the viewer has to visual work is valid, it was nice to see him up there rebelling and trying to mess with everyone's heads, seemingly believing the same himself. However, as an educated viewer and fan of his work, it was not all that fun to listen to him lie to the audience throughout the talk, so it was a bit of a mixed bag for me.

This was my first time recording audio so pardon the less than perfect quality. You'll probably hear a bit of the simultaneous translation blaring out of the headphones of people around me, but you can make out what he says just fine.

Enjoy!

(Ah, I just noticed you'll have to click through to the actual post from your RSS reader to hear the video clip)