How does Torbjørn Rødland make us doubt reality through photographs?

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Published on 5 October 2021. Updated on 16 July 2026.

We definitely are in a new era. More often than not, one can read here and there that a work is “problematic”. In general, it is not a good sign for the work in question, which is finding itself propelled into the abyss of cancel culture. However, being “problematic” is the least that can be expected from a work of art. It is first and foremost what differentiates it from advertising, propaganda or ornamentation. Only “problematic” artworks can build art history. The others, even the most explicitly demanding of them, only feed the entertainment industry. It is not a problem in itself, but it does have another purpose.

Torbjørn Rødland, the photographer of disturbing contrasts

At the age of 55, Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland can boast about having a resolutely problematic body of work. One that is not meaningless, but subject to interpretation. “If someone looks at one of my images and asks me what it means, I say, ‘Yes, what does that mean?’ I create these images because I am interested in their history. I hope that everyone can imagine something by looking at them to find meaning in them.”

Torbjørn Rødland was born in 1970 in Stavanger, Norway’s fourth-largest city and also one of the oldest, founded in 1125. For the past 10 years, he has been based in Los Angeles, in the mountainous district of Laurel Canyon. In Stavanger, he did culture studies, before graduating from the National College of Art and Design in Bergen. The first works he exhibited were made while he was still a student. Composed of 21 images, the series In a Norwegian Landscape (1993-1995) is a succession of self-portraits that stages him in the breathtaking Norwegian wilderness. In the first seven pictures, he carries a plastic supermarket bag. That bag creates a disturbance since its mere presence seems to debunk the perfect beauty of the landscape, without totally ruining it.

“I create these images because I am interested in their history.” — Torbjørn Rødland

Curiously enough, this series could well appear in the photographer’s work today without anyone noticing it was taken more than 30 years ago. That observation could also apply to even older images, which he did not exhibit, but agreed to publish in Dazed magazine. One of them — already a self-portrait — shows him as a teenager, staring at the lens and holding a mug decorated with an eye. This third eye complicates the scene quite a bit, offering it less literal narrative possibilities. Torbjørn Rødland had the opportunity to understand early on that making a complex image is a difficult choice. As a teenager, he contributed to local newspapers with press cartoons. He eventually noticed that his services were called upon less and less as his drawings became more ambiguous.

Bible Eye, his major exhibition, was presented at the Jones Center – The Contemporary Austin in Texas in 2021. The one that ended in March 2021 at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in Zurich, was entitled More than Tongue Can Tell. The combination of these two titles set the tone for his photographic work which, since the 1990s, has been inspiring pleasure and anxiety by imposing a different form of transaction onto viewers. Instead of delivering a specific, straightforward discourse to his audience, Torbjørn Rødland confronts us with all kinds of assumptions. His ideas are structured in such a way that meaning differs for each one of us. These feel more like diabolical traps, which quickly become an obsession. As one projects meaning onto them, one is perfectly aware that it only reflects oneself.

“I like to think of tarot cards as very good templates for my images. Each card has symbolism. But the meaning is very open. It depends on the person reading the card, for whom they are reading it, and it changes according to the other cards placed on the left and right. The tarot card remains open to the questions that each individual asks, to his or her history, and, in my case, to the memories of popular photography. If I was 100% sure what one of my photos meant, then I wouldn’t really want to show it, or even take it, for that matter. I’m interested in everything that has several degrees of meaning, which can change its meaning, which is what makes different people have a different reading of the final image,” the Norwegian photographer shared with curator Trine Stephensen in an interview for Paper Journal.

“If I was 100% sure what my photos meant, then I wouldn’t really show, or even take them, for that matter.” — Torbjørn Rødland

Torbjørn Rødland‘s images do not produce strangeness, they produce doubt and, as the irruption of a plastic bag carried in the hand in a grandiose nature thwarts the intention of “beautiful photography”, often simply resort to a principle of duality. Two characters in the image — even if we only see one hand of one of them — are often of different ethnicities, sizes or ages: nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and in this slight sidestep from the obvious, doubt rushes in and the narration begins. It is quite surprising to be confronted with an image that chooses to be silent and at the same time seems to say to us: “It’s up to you.” Paradoxically, it is this ambiguity that makes their style and homogeneity, in exactly the same way that each episode of the Black Mirror television series can feature totally different actors, play in totally different eras, but still form a whole with a unique style.

Rødland‘s work spans over thirty years, but it is difficult to say whether a particular work is new or older. Not that he has gone through the recent history of photography without taking note of the bifurcations inflicted on him by advertising photography in the 1990s, fashion photography in the 2000s and intimate photography in the era of social networks and self-exposure. But the inflections imposed by images in general in his photography, in particular, are not literal either. At best, there are simple traps to tame our attention. Besides, his works have stood the test of time without being intimidated by digital photography. Rødland only uses film and consents to the uncertainty of an unrepentant result. Repentance, in this matter, would be quite useless. His images seem to be the fruit of such patient premeditation that they summon sophisticated Caravaggio-like chiaroscuro or seem to rely on the climatic conditions of the moment.

“His images have specific destinations, some are intended to be exhibited, others to be published in magazines, others to be collected in books, which sometimes creates some confusion among collectors,” Florence Bonnefous, who has been exhibiting the artist at Air de Paris gallery since 1999, explains. On rare occasions, the images change category. Thus, in 2015, at the Rodolphe Janssen Gallery in Brussels, he exhibited a set of photographs featuring Paris Hilton – which had been commissioned from him by the magazine Purple. “She is sitting between her two dogs. She looks calm, but her Instagram is crazy. Nine hundred likes per minute. If your art seems frozen to you, then go for a walk in the water, or find something else,” he writes in a short introduction to the catalogue.

But he did not transform into “works of art” the commissioned images he made with Nicolas Cage, Robert Pattinson or singer Sophie. And for all these images, the model’s celebrity seems to be just another layer of information. According to Maurizio Cattelan, who interviewed him in 2017 and asked him what an image is made of, he replied: “Layer upon layer of perception and identification.” His images seem to be the fruit of such patient premeditation that they summon sophisticated Caravaggio chiaroscuro or seem to rely on the climatic conditions of the moment.

Jean-Luc Godard‘s famous saying “tracking shots are a matter of morality” invites us to think in the same way about how Torbjørn Rødland considers photography and the place of his work among contemporary images in the digital age of photojournalism and social networks. His position seems based on a certain morality. “I stand there, next to the person who is looking at these images, and I say to him: ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t it?’ I’m not overlooking, as if I knew in advance what she should be looking for in these images, what she should find there. I’m next to her, finding these photos fascinating too, without really knowing what they mean.”