Ballen is a New Yorker living outside the United States. The series being shown at Noorderlicht was made in rural South Africa. Here many white Afrikaners live in isolation, because they cannot or will not adapt to the unavoidable political changes occurring in their land. These people, mixed couples, civil servants and independent diamond miners live in poverty, and seem leftovers from another era. Ballen (b. USA, 1950) portrays them in their own homes, against a blank wall, often in a corner of a room. These are disorienting and even controversial images, utterly without any form of romanticism. Ballen worked for twenty years on this remarkable series. During that time the work developed from classic studies of the villages, through unsettling portraits of their residents, into a "documentary fiction." He presents this most recent work, in which the people function as actors in a dark, dysfunctional drama. Ballen graduated from the University of California. Following that he left the United States for five years of world travel. After this trip he settled in South Africa, establishing himself as a geologist for a mining firm.