“I am not interested simply in documenting a place; I want to reveal something deeper, something that exists beyond what we are aware of.”

His first monograph in colour opens a new chapter in his work. After decades spent working only in black and white, Ballen began experimenting with colour in 2016, when he was given a Leica SL — a turn that opened new possibilities and pushed him to reconsider the relation of his pictures to light, to depth, to matter and to form. Here he sets out that experiment in his own words, while asking what the spirits and the spaces that inhabit his work mean, symbolically and psychologically.