IN THE MAGAZINE

THE PERVERTED PHOTOGRAPHY OF TORBJØRN RØDLAND

By Bob Nickas

Published July, 2009

Although Torbjørn Rødland recalls having a camera from the age of 11, as a teenager his passion was drawing. “After doing caricatures and political cartoons for local newspapers,” he says, “I got fed up with communicating easily decodable ideas through images.”* One look at his photographs and it’s clear to see that this reluctance to “deliver as expected” fully informed his subsequent return to the camera, and defines an intentionally varied body of photographic work that ranges from highly stylized to naturalistic pictures. In fact, despite the directness of the medium and the clean immediacy of his style, his picture-making, like the man himself, can be elusive in ways that are fascinating, confounding, and yet ultimately rewarding. The 39-year-old Rødland, based in Oslo, Norway, but itinerate, taking pictures everywhere, is both engaging and marked by a Nordic reserve. In his work, which encompasses every genre—portrait, landscape, and still life—as well as video, he reveals everything and is withholding at the same time. His most beguiling pictures, like a well-crafted pop song with an insidious hook, grab you and don’t let go. Arms (2008), in which the tentacle of an octopus emerges from the sleeve of a woman’s sweater and gently coils around her fingers, is a near perfect example of how Rødland creates images that somehow lay claim to strangeness and normalcy at the same time. It’s their matter-of-fact quality that allows a level of acceptance to slip almost unnoticed through the side door. At first glance, there is of course an unreality to the picture, but Rødland isn’t so interested in the first take, and he understands, even if we don’t, that photography, no matter how false a mirror, always reflects a world we can recognize or meet halfway. Imagine that very same image, the woman’s hand and the tentacle, equally graceful, was drawn or a composite rather than a photo. Suddenly, the same picture is transformed into a surrealist rendering—a dream image by Jim Shaw or a collage by Max Ernst.

Let’s consider two of the most ubiquitous pictures in vernacular photography: the bride on her wedding day and the baby, one usually preceding the other. Living in an all-pervasive image world, you can’t help but wonder, with the most frequently repeated types of pictures, how is it possible to make a photo that is distinct from the millions that have come before? Rødland’s Arch Back Bride (2007) manages just that. This is a portrait of a bride unlike any we’ve previously seen. She smiles as she would for the photographer, her lovely face framed by a fluffy veil—the heavenly cloud—and the strapless gown emphasizes the soft bare skin of her shoulder. The idealized image of the bride all dressed in white, untouched, about to give herself to marriage and its consummation, is posed on the floor, with her back arched high in an exaggerated manner. What’s going on here? This is the first and only unanswered question. Look again at her face. She’s not really smiling, and her lips are pressed together. She knows something that we don’t: the bride’s secret on her wedding day.

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