Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. Since 1982 he has been living and taking photographs in South Africa. In 2001 Outland (Phaidon Press) received the Best Photography Book of the Year Award at PhotoEspaña. In 2002 Ballen won the Photographer of the Year Award at the inaugural Rencontres d’Arles Awards. Since 2002 Ballen has had over fifty exhibitions worldwide, including one-man shows at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and Gagosian Gallery in New York. His work is represented in many museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, recently, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels held a retrospective exhibition of his work.