Roger Ballen directs Die Antwoord

He's no stranger to controversy, but 62-year-old photographer Roger Ballen still cut an unlikely figure as the first-time director of a promo video for one of the world's most provocative new music acts, rap-rave duo Die Antwoord ("The Answer" in Afrikaans). In more ways than one, however, they occupy much the same universe.

Glorifying "zef" style - the trashy, swaggering, post-apartheid culture of white, working class South Africa - the band befriended Ballen after emailing him fan letters when his book, Shadow Chamber, was published in 2005. Five years later, their single, Zef Side, had become a bona fide hit, crashing the duo's website and generating eight million hits on YouTube. They had also appropriated drawings from Ballen's constructed photographs, putting them all over their clothes and in the backgrounds to their video. Ballen took the appropriation in good spirit, and quickly agreed when band members Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er asked him to shoot their next music video last December.

Ballen isn't a fan of most music videos, arguing that they "feel as if they came out of Hollywood" and "look plastic". Nobody could accuse his effort of doing so. He sketched out and constructed a series of sets for the band, daubing them with graffiti and investing them with his inimitable off-kilter style. "We didn't think about the lyrics, it was about the visuals, and that was what interested me," says Ballen. "I think it's very hard for visuals to compete with music, because we have a more primitive response to a beat than to anything we see. But with this thing we created, the visuals really extend the music quite substantially, instead of the other way round.

Roger Ballen's intense style proved a good fit for South African rap-rave duo Die Antwoord. Image © Roger Ballen.

"It put me in a new zone," he adds. "For me, that's what making art is about; extending your own consciousness, your own perception of what your work is about, how you fit into your own work, and extending the meaning of what you do. It's unfortunate that a lot of the artists making art today aren't thinking about their work in this way."

Visit www.rogerballen.com and www.dieantwoord.com.

Pieter Hugo co-directs Spoek Mathambo's Control

Pieter Hugo came to create his striking black-and-white video for Spoek Mathambo's cover of the Joy Division classic She's Lost Control quite by accident, after he inadvertently discovered that Mathambo was a fan of his photography. "Spoek used one of my images for a mixtape without getting my permission," Hugo explains. "I called him up, and it turned out he was recording an album around the corner from my studio [in Cape Town]. He popped in to apologise. We got talking, he played me some of his demos and I really liked the Control track - a strange hybrid of township funk-goth-darkwave-pop. I thought we could do an interesting video and had been speaking to [South African cinematographer] Michael Cleary about doing a video piece together. Voila!"

Still from Pieter Hugo's video for Spoek Mathambo. Image © Pieter Hugo.

Co-directing alongside Cleary, he shot the video for Control - which had no budget, no involvement from the musician and record company beyond this initial conversation with Mathambo - using two Canon 5D Mk II cameras. The video sparked a return to film for Hugo, who had worked in the industry before turning to photography. "I used to assist art directors on film and television commercials," he says. "You can't really compare film and photography. I'm less precious about film; I haven't invested as much emotionally into it and don't particularly care for it. Not having that investment in it made it fun to do - it was frivolous."

Despite his seeming disdain for the medium, shooting the video for Control sparked a renewed interest in working with film for Hugo, who admits he is now working on some further moving image projects. "Actually yes, the video has inspired me to do more," he says. "No more music videos though!"

Visit www.pieterhugo.com and www.spoekmathambo.com.