I just picked this book up today and was amazed at its sensitivity and beauty. Not everyone will enjoy it or understand this book but it has a feeling of Diane Arbus and the easiness of early Mary Ellen Mark with a kick of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The compositions are beautiful and the inclusion of the animals are perfect.

Ballen proves himself an able photographer, however by focusing on the freaks and degenerates in my own country, he tends to skew reality substantially, and his book serves only to re-inforce often damaging stereotypical views.

The American photographer Roger Ballen has spent his time in South Africa taking pictures of the rural life as it is. Transvaal, the vast area in Nothern South Africa, is known for its isolation. Here and there some farms had been erected throughout the centuries and the white inhabitants live their lives gently there in clan-like familial structures for many, many years and generations. They hardly meet other people than their own relatives and co-workers, farmers and the shop-owner and his wife. Going to church on Sundays is the great social event of the week. This isolation has changed these Afrikaners - an originally Dutch white tribe planted in South Africa over three centuries ago - into what they are now. A tough, proud, peasant-like people who are of vital importance to the South African economy, but who now also battle with impoverishment. Intermarriages and inbreeding (not deliberately, however) occur much more in these people's communities than for instance in the United States and Europe. Once originated from a limited number of Dutch, French and German families from 17th-century Europe, some of these Afrikaners are slowly but surely degenerating. Their lives seem pointless and tedious according to the book, which on the other hand can't be denied fully. Because of in-breeding the average IQ is lower than elsewhere amongst the Afrikaners. Roger Ballen knew that and with the somewhat rebellious intention of unmasking the formerly dominant and 'righteous' white tribe as a degenerating crowd with an IQ that's dropping, he selected the most conspicuous examples of degeneration and impoverishment within the community of the Poor Whites in the most callous parts of the Transvaal. Unfortunately, making it seem as if these people are representable for the Transvaal white community, Roger Ballen will mislead many readers/viewers with this photo-book. One could make a similar shocking book about rural life in Texas, but one will have to search some more intensively. Nevertheless, Platteland is a ! very confronting book with very interesting and recognisable features, in case you have been to Transvaal and have absorbed the atmosphere of the white farming community there.

The book shows what happens when a system fails and forgets to support the former superior working class in South Africa after Apartheid. The country now (6 years after)still carries the legacy burden. A history book. Maybe it will be reprinted.