PORTRAITS: Photographer 2 Research

Another photographer I came across, after asking other class members which photographers they had found, was Torbjørn Rødland, born in Stavanger, Norway but now living and working in Los Angeles and Oslo. 

He went to art school in Bergen where he experimented with long lenses, creating the voyeuristic effect of his breakthrough series 'In a Norwegian Landscape'. He is now well known for his portraits of characters including beautiful models, old men, cute animals, memorably Paris Hilton, in bizarre and banal settings. What those works share in common is that Rødland himself is at their centre. “(I wanted) to make sure it didn’t turn into reportage,” he says of the decision to put himself in the frame. “(To show) how a photograph can come from a subjective place (and) show a psychological, emotional reality, rather than just a dry description of what’s in front of the camera.”

Rødland is excited at the prospect of shocking the uninitiated. “It feels great,” he says. “I like that process of seeing how the photographs find new neighbours and how their content starts to bleed into each other – how (works) that have been made many years apart can come together and influence one another.”

http://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/37570/1/torbjorn-rodland-serpentine-exhibition-photographer

Over the last two decades, Torbjørn Rødland has created a body of images in which precision and critical rigor are finely laced with an improvisational and tactile intensity. Evading the reach of language, his subtly double-edged allegories make visible a broad spectrum of sensory experience, as well as physical and emotional exchange, coalescing at his work’s center the unpredictable physicality of our world.

https://www.presenhuber.com/home/exhibitions/2017/Torbj%C3%B8rn-R%C3%B8dland/Press-Release.html
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