DORPS, Small Towns of South Africa

Unpaginated (140 pages), 2 frontispieces and 64 full page photographic plates, white simulated cloth, a very good copy in the dust jacket (protected by a mylar cover).

'"Dorps, Small Towns of South Africa" is a moving and poetic statement about a vanishing world. An American who has lived in South Africa for several years, Roger Ballen brings to his job the best of two worlds: he is both outsider and insider, he has a view uncluttered by sentiment, sometimes even brutal in its frankness; as an insider, he has a sensitive eye for nuance and mood. Above all, his view is compassionate. In stripping bare whatever and whoever his camera focuses upon, he knows how to expose "what is mortal and unsure". Unflinching, his camera's eye stares at unrelenting reality; at the same it reveals essences of experience and of being in the world. In capturing the most fleeting moments Roger Ballen yet presents in his images a quality of timelessness. And in doing so he persuades the reader to rediscover a world too easily taken for granted, forcing him not just to look at the world, but to see through it.' André Brink.