Roger Ballen grew up immersed in the photography world. His mother, Adrienne, was an editor at Magnum, and the walls of his childhood home in Rye, N.Y., were filled with her colleagues’ images.

“By the time I went out to photograph seriously, which was around the age of eighteen, I had a clear idea of the level I was aiming at,” Mr. Ballen, 68, writes in “Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective,” the first retrospective book of his career, which Thames & Hudson published in October.

While Mr. Ballen, an internationally renowned artist with nearly a dozen books to his name, has photographed virtually his entire life, he didn’t start thinking of himself as an artist until his late 40s. He stopped working as a geologist only in his 50s. He directed his first viral music video in his 60s.