Bachelor and Spinsters Balls take place across rural Australia. They are events that were originally designed to overcome distance; formalized social congregations providing an opportunity for locals to meet potential life partners. "It has over time dissolved into chaos, anarchy and an urge to disconnect from the established." Photographer Ingvar Kenne's new book, The Ball, is a collection of photographs from his visits to various B&S balls across Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and the Northern Territory.
"This new path is not something uniquely Australian. Events playing out with near identical trajectories take place all across the Western world; Midsummer celebrations in Sweden, the Spring Break calamities in the US... franchised days of rapture, endlessly repeated. Today, B&S balls are symptomatic of certain apathy towards times gone and indeed what lies in the future. How do we authentically relate to the past any longer? And how does this inform our identity, our traditions and the way in which we belong? And without that connection back in time, can we form an idea of what the future should behold? In The Ball, the steadfast pattern of confusion and disorder begin to reveal something else entirely. The chaos becomes both a representation and a metaphor for living only in the now with intensity and joy that perhaps suggest that life is forever and neither yesterday or tomorrow matter." —Ingvar Kenne
Ingvar Kenne's The Ball is available here.
