Roger Ballen, Inferno, 2025

The project stems from an intuition of Didi Bozzini, curator and scholar of the Commedia, who perceived the striking affinity between Dante’s imagery and the Ballenesque universe. “The Inferno was structured by Dante as a theater of wonder,” observes Bozzini. “The repeated appearance in the mind of unexpected, disconcerting, frightening, or astonishing visions is precisely what sustains the poem’s narrative framework.”

Prompted to engage with the poet’s work, Roger Ballen selected sixty-seven photographs from his series The Theatre of Apparitions—a title that immediately conveys the deep connection between the images and the text. A geologist by training, Ballen is, like Dante, a traveler of the depths: both share the same radical gesture—descending into the abyss, exploring the hidden layers of matter and being. “For me,” writes Ballen, “the camera has always been the dark chamber, a kind of window into the dimly lit room of my inner self.”

It is precisely within this inner space that the photographs—created in collaboration with Marguerite Rossouw—take shape. The result of an intuitive and multilayered creative process, the close analogy between the subconscious and the underground forms the very core of their genesis.

Ballen stages a theatre of apparitions in which, as in Dante’s Inferno, every image is at once figure and symbol, presence and allegory. Far from being a mere illustrative exercise, the photographs powerfully and originally reflect an introspective journey that is both allegorical and deeply lived. “The photographs chosen for this version of the Inferno are a combination of the inner world and the outer world. They are representations that recreate the murky, dreamlike reality of a realm beyond,” writes Ballen. “Like Dante’s characters, they are the flickering archetypes of humanity’s collective unconscious. My hope is that these photographs offer a path toward revealing one of life’s most fundamental mysteries: what happens after our death?”