Published in 2020, The World According to Roger Ballen brings together photographs from across Roger Ballen’s career with installations made for an exhibition at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris. The book accompanied the first major exhibition of his work in France, but its scope extends beyond that institutional occasion: it considers how Ballen’s practice belongs within modern and contemporary art as well as photography.

Rather than arranging the material as a strictly chronological retrospective, the book is organized thematically. Career-spanning photographs appear alongside the exhibition installations and examples of objects and works from Ballen’s own collection of art brut. These shifts of medium and context encourage the reader to see the photographs not as an isolated body of images, but as part of a broader field of affinities, recurring ideas, and artistic preoccupations.

Colin Rhodes supplies the principal texts and places Ballen’s work in relation to art brut, a connection central to the book’s interpretive framework. Martine Lusardy, director of the Halle Saint Pierre, contributes an introduction and an interview with Ballen. The combination of scholarly contextualization, curatorial perspective, and the artist’s own account gives the volume several complementary ways of approaching the work without reducing it to a single disciplinary category.

At 208 pages, this is significant for a collection because it documents both a substantial career selection and installations conceived for a particular exhibition. Its thematic structure and inclusion of material from Ballen’s personal art brut collection distinguish it from a straightforward photographic survey. For readers concerned with the relationship between photography, collecting, exhibition-making, and art outside established academic traditions, the book offers a focused record of how those territories meet within Ballen’s practice.