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Contact e) robball1@gmail.com / t) + 44 (0) 7834 542301 Biography Born 1977, England Education Exhibitions Publications / Awards Print Sales All Images © Rob Ball ---------- Text Review: The Redemptive Beauty of Life After Death Robert Ball’s photos of pacemakers and guns isolate traces of death and the dead with unadorned matter-of-factness. The pacemaker photographs, individually titled using their unique serial numbers, evoke associations with imprisonment and the systematic tagging of Jews during the Second World War. The former carriers of the pacemakers are implied, but only through their absence, unified by their fragility and without any real impression of individuality. In doing so these images convey how long-term illness confines and, to an extent, impounds sufferers. Hugh Dichmont, AN Artist Newsletter ---------- Legacies of the Engaged Image: The Redemptive Beauty of Life after Death In the photographs by Robert Ball, of second hand guns and pacemakers taken from the bodies of the deceased before cremation, two sophisticated technologies are productively contrasted. The former machines were explicitly designed to remove human life, the latter to extend it. That the guns Ball records, laid out on a dark background as though in a museum display case, reminds us that photography's history is closely tied in with the development of evidence-gathering. Ball's work draws on an aesthetics of plain display, of a no-nonsense presentation of the object, an approach whose (false) neutralisation of the thing recorded strangely forces one to concentrate upon the weapon's functional attributes. [9] Almost everything about these firearms looks to be “about” the carrying out of the act for which they were designed, though the placing of the guns on a dark backcloth might be not so much a museological conceit as a metaphor for the weapon's hidden power, the way that the firing of a gun “can change a hundred lives in a split second” (Ball). With the pacemakers, the niceties of their workings are hidden away, firstly in their active life whilst operating inside a human body, and, secondly, even when one sees the revealed object, a generally rare sight of something that is today a quite commonly employed device. It as though Ball is visually staging the claim that whilst it is easy to take away a life, preserving and extending it, for all our scientific and rational understanding, remains one of the most technically complex and morally convoluted issues we face. Peter Suchin ---------- On Pacemakers - Ball’s photographic study of pacemakers ‘happened by accident’ coming out of a previous two year documentary project on morgues. Pacemakers are removed from their owners before burial or cremation and the artist gathered twenty-five specimens which he photographed with a large format camera in a studio. Ball was compelled to the visual scrutinisation; ‘everything about them fascinated me, each on representing a life (or death), each one powering a body until its final moments – before the human or the machine gave up’. In presenting his prints of these devices as clinically as possibly Ball highlights an indexical function or objectivity of photography owing much to the industrial and architectural photographs of contemporary German photography particularly Bernd and Hiller Becher. There is also a more surreal and disturbing element to the series of photographs if one considers the objects in terms of a metamorphose from inert mechanism with only slight variations between units, to part of a living human. Though subsequently removed each pacemaker has in fact been a vital part of an individual human biology and life. Magdalene Keaney, The National Portrait Gallery
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