Portraits: Eddie Chacon, Photographs: Torbjorn Rodland
Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer TORBJØRN RØDLAND has been creating images that pervert and sabotage the medium via tableaux rife with symbolism. They are suggestive, ominous, backlit hallucinations of the unconscious - at times violent and horrifying and other times his phantasmagoric scenes are desperate pleas for surrender and tender forgiveness, a begging and praying for touch, to belong, and to exist. This summer, there are three major exhibitions of Rødland’s work: The Touch That Made You at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Fifth Honeymoon at Bergen Kunsthall, and Backlit Rainbow at David Kordansky Gallery, his first significant solo exhibition in Los Angeles. On the occasion of these exhibitions, we present two interviews of one of the most important practitioners of postmodern photography.
BL Studies, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper 57 x 45 cm Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Definitely. It was the whole idea of handling popular iconography. I thought it was strange to be an artist and a photographer and just ignore that side of photography. It made a lot of sense to me to go into popular forms. I thought it was limiting to pretend to just analyze them from a distance. The Pictures Generation represented a perfect historical project. I could move photography in a more sentimental or psychological or bodily direction – risk losing that critical distance, to go beyond the established, to find places in between subject and object, a presence that’s beyond the dead thing in front of you on the table.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There seems to be something else in the images open to interpretation.
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I think it’s important not to give too much away, to pull people in. That’s my goal: to achieve that quality in an image that I feel is beyond my understanding, but where I know that there’s something to understand, something that feels not random, but of importance.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Did that articulate itself from the beginning?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: It was there from the start. With In a Norwegian Landscape I learned to control the image formally. And then Close Encounter represents exercising that control almost too tightly. I would go to the location three times: first to find it, then I’d go back when the light was ideal, and then a third time with a model. And I knew pretty much what she was going to do there, how she was going to sit. It was more about execution. But then I broke with that also in 1997 and started working more spontaneously. I still do the casting, choose clothes, and set the stage, but I don’t know exactly what the outcome will be. It’s more of a back and forth. I’m very open to unexpected things that happen.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: The Serpentine exhibition has several tropes that recur within the works. In that sense, it’s very much a survey of your work.
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: That’s part of the joy of putting together a show like this, or an extensive book. I’m also discovering these links. When I’m working, I don’t necessarily see them until the work is done and I look back at it. The process isn’t really finished until the show is up and you can study it all.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Some of your images self-reflect on the medium. Can you talk about that?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I think that’s very much my background. Most of the images have a self-reflective aspect. It’s important to help their reading. We don’t have the safety net of an explanation. There’s an element that’s relatable but also one that’s abstract and hard to pin down. This is all a reaction to postmodern language-consciousness.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: How do you choose your objects and models?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: It’s an exploration. It can be an object that stops me: I don’t know what it has but I’d like to find out. If I know exactly why I want to photograph an object, if it’s predictable how it will turn out, how the resulting image will be read, well, then it’s less interesting to me. In similar ways, you could read my portraits [Four Words, 2005] with words or paint on them as violating the individual, but I see them as a violation or a challenge to the tradition of portraiture. I want to make portraits that point to something beyond the individual and so I’m drawn to people whom I think can help me achieve that.
Shower Head, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper,45 x 57 cm, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There are quite a lot of images where there’s an object and there’s a portrait — these kinds of non-equilibrium situations. Is there a relation to Surrealism?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: There probably is. It’s not something that I’ve studied a lot. But if you go into Surrealism, there are probably a lot of parallels when it comes to finding and exploring these in-between spaces.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: When explaining the title of your exhibition, The Touch That Made You, you say that we’re to some degree a result of how we’re seen, how we’re held, and how we’re touched. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the notion of touch and why you decided to use that as the title of your show.
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I like a title to have different layers of meaning, in similar ways to a photograph. The title of this show can point to the analog processes: the touch of the camera, the touch of the light hitting the film, the touch of the liquids running over the film during processing. And I’m linking that to the stickiness and intimacy of certain motifs — these encounters between two individuals or between objects and bodies. On a psychological level, the way we’re held and protected or touched in our childhood is crucial to the psyche and personality and the issues we’re left to deal with for the rest of our lives.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: This brings us to your process of working. You work with analog, not digital photography. The layers of meaning in your photographs are staged and constructed. How do you feel this is more achievable through analog rather than digital?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I’m sure layers of meaning can be constructed digitally but I’m equally drawn to layers of non-meaning — to feeling, to presence, to projection and identification. And I’m more successful in creating images that resonate with me on a deeper level when I work with less overview and control, when there’s an element of surprise or even disbelief in seeing the results, the contact sheets, from a photographic session. The liquid process also makes a lot of sense to me. So yes, I work on film and I have analog contact sheets made. Then I make quick digital snaps of selected frames on the contact sheet and look at them and group them together on a laptop. I don’t really see the image in its full quality until I decide to print it. Seeing the big print can be a very positive experience. Finally I get to see what I did. It can be several years later.
Candles and Cubes, 2016 Chromogenic print on Kodak Endura paper mounted on dibond, 62.2 x 78.1 x 3.8 cm Qiao Zhibing’s Collection Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles CA
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And then there are your films. In the exhibition, we’re presenting 132 BPM (2005). You made films between 2004 and 2007, but not since.
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Exactly. It’s been ten years and I’m trying to make a new one now. Installing my first survey show at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo in 2003 made it clear to me how coherent my project had been. I’d realized almost every photographic curiosity in nature; the forest had been my stage. That survey show, titled Grave with a View, led to bigger changes. I felt the need to expand the circle more. First I made a solo show with only black and white photography and then, later in 2003, I wrote the script for my first film The Exorcism of Mother Teresa (2004). While filming I realized that I didn’t want to use a script in the future, but my initial impulse was: I need this! It seemed like a very difficult thing to do — to put together a small movie. 132 BPM is a good example of how I use the medium to explore movement, interval, and temporality — qualities I do not get to explore that explicitly in still photography. So it’s still an exploration of the photographic medium but with different parameters. 132 BPM is the result of me spending a month in Croatia with a metronome and an iPod with a playlist where every song is exactly 132 beats per minute. And then I applied this rhythm to my temporary surroundings. I spent two weeks casting and finding locations and two weeks filming every day and editing a little every night. The whole film was built during those four weeks.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And the soundtrack?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I walked into the only record store in Rijeka and it happened to play a new album by a French duo called Sex in Dallas and it was very, very close to what I’d imagined as a soundtrack. So I contacted them and after doing the first edit of the film, I spent some time in Berlin with them making the music. Then everything came together. There’s an original soundtrack to all the films except for one. And I tried something slightly different in each movie. There’s one called Blues for Bigfoot (2005) that in method is almost a documentary, while the first one, The Exorcism of Mother Teresa is closer to a horror film. The last one I did, I Am Linkola (2007), also has a techno soundtrack.
Headphones, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper,140 x 110 cm Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And the new film is going to be your first film in Los Angeles?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Yes, in the city of movies!
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: That leads us to the question: how has LA influenced your work since you moved there? Do you have any sense of how your images or motifs have moved between and adjusted to a different cultural flow?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: This is something I do see in my work: there’s this mix between Nordic melancholia, Japanese cuteness, and American vulgarity – different image traditions corresponding to different sides of me. It’s harder to point to what has changed lately because of Los Angeles.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: That’s a great conclusion before my final question: do you have any dream projects you haven’t been able to realize?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Typically, I don’t start with a very big idea that I then have to downscale for them to be realistic. I get ideas from what I see around me and objects that are available. It’s based more on seeing the potential in the everyday than on downscaling something overly ambitious.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: What would your advice be for a young photographer/artist?
TORBJØRN RØDLAND: If there’s something they want to do, then that’s what they should focus on. There’s this tendency to try to navigate and orientate towards what’s being made at the moment, but it’s important to be brave enough to do something that doesn’t seem to fit in the here and now – as long as we agree to avoid nostalgia.
Excerpt from the publication “Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You” published by Fondazione Prada, Milano 2018.
