“Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.” -John Szarkowski

Photographs by Roger Ballen and Alec Soth. Drawn from disparate locales—the outskirts of Johannesburg for Ballen and the path of the Mississippi River for Soth—the photographs depict marginalized people and places. Ballen’s stark work in black-and-white contrasts with the color-saturated, mid-American vision of Soth, yet both blur the line between documentary and fiction in their portrayals of vernacular life.

Shadow Chambers, a monograph of Roger Ballen’s photographs, is to be published by Phaidon Press in fall 2005. This is Phaidon’s second publication of Ballen’s work, following the award-winning Outland. In September, an exhibition of Ballen’s photography will begin at the Frans Hals Museum in Amsterdam and will travel to the Museum voor Fotografie, Belgium, the Dietchtorhollen in Hamburg, Germany and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A domestic exhibition will open in 2006 at the Atlanta College of Arts and will conclude at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

Works from Alec Soth’s highly acclaimed series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, were exhibited in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials and are currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago de Chile. A book by the same title has recently been reprinted by Steidl Publishers, who will also publish his next body of work in 2006. Alec Soth: Portraits is currently on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. His photography is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.