SET THE SCENE

Brit Barton: You started thinking of the single image -after growing up and making political cartoons. What was that initial process like for you and how was the transition into photography?

Torbjørn Rødland: It began with me being asked if I wanted to go to kindergarten and I said no, not really. I was just so fascinated by drawing and making im-ages nonstop. My entire childhood, I would just draw. It wasn’t about saving the result, but the act of making something, a picture.

At six I started doing drawings of politicians on TV. I knew I was going to be an editorial cartoonist. I started working for the number two newspaper at sixteen in my hometown of Stavanger, Norway. My father was an amateur photographer, so I had access to a camera, but I wasn’t ambitious. In my late teens the drawings became more subtle and less pointed, and eventually less suitable for the newspaper. In my studies, I got more familiar with contemporary art and what that could be: I shifted the focus from drawing to photography, but my ambitious cartooning seems to have decided certain qualities and preferences in my approach to the medium.

You’ve been based in Los Angeles now for fourteen years. There is the cliché that comes with photography regarding cinema and its influence, but it is inescapable in your work. Considering your past use of actors and extras or even the landscape, how has LA influenced your work?

I lost interest in making longer movies when I moved to Los Angeles. I thought that would be the next move but I lost the drive. When it comes to how I’ve been photographing, there are a lot of people who are open to collaborating and taking on whatever fiction someone else is interested in creating. A lot of people I end up working with have had “normal” jobs and they retire and want to entertain themselves and stay active by becoming extras in movies and TV. There are some photographs I’ve made that are coming out of the cityscape of Los Angeles but actually, there are very few.

Often what I’m curious about is remaking an image or drawing I picked up elsewhere. But the work doesn’t come out of the external place of where it’s been made, it’s more from an inner world. Of course, anything can signify a place – like a door handle, or a power outlet – indicating geography or culture. I started photographing people recognizable from mass media as early as 1998, in Norway. In short, the project was pretty developed before moving to Los Angeles in 2010. It makes sense: the images I would cut from magazines and glue into a scrapbook as a child were largely promotional images coming from Los Angeles, and they were linked to television series, recording artists, and movies. The images that the city produces were already part of my fascination with still photography from an early age.

I don’t think you can necessarily see a difference between photographs I’ve made in Los Angeles or in Berlin, or in Norway. It isn’t that, say, the Japanese influences only show up in Japan, they show up else-where. There can be a delay; I’m dipping into a certain image culture and then I go somewhere else and realize what I’ve learned, or what can be done. The idea that Los Angeles changed me and freed me is a seductive narrative, but I just don’t think it’s the most accurate.

The idea of image-making, for me, is rooted in a hunter vs. gatherer philosophy. The old adage being that you either hunt for an image, or gather and compose an image in the studio. I don’t know where you fall, given some of the surrealist aspects of your images.

I’m surprised you think gathering only happens in the studio. I would imagine it’s more that hunting and gathering happens out in the real world and the studio is more like farming – if we run with the metaphor. The end of the hunter-gatherer period. But farming feels too controlled or planned. I’m trying to keep the beauty and the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, while still working mostly like a farmer. Which means, wanting to make photographs that have the energy and poetry of the spontaneous moment from 20th-century reportage photography but refusing to settle with what randomly happens around me and the camera. I might as well modify what is in front of me, initiate it, and then enter into a reality that’s like movie making but still much more improvised and low production. It’s just me and a tripod, no assistants.

I typically set the scene – meaning there is a location in mind, and I invite someone to come to that -location to realize something, either specific or open-ended. I try out what I had in mind and then it turns into improv very quickly, and even when it kind of works you want to try some other options. It becomes a back and forth dialogue like any other open-ended artistic practice. One just has to see what happens.

It doesn’t quite feel like hunting or gathering. What I gather is not the finished food, but rather the components, like a person, an object, a place, and then it’s more about giving life to the combination of these. The starting point is like that of any photographer: you see something out in the world that strikes you as interesting. There is no ethical standard that says you’re not allowed to move things in the world to make the photograph you thirst for. It isn’t about -telling a truthful story like in a documentary. The truth is more metaphorical, akin to a constellation that has some truth to it through symbolism. Everyone who sees it can find their own way into the image. That to me is the way for a photograph to be truthful.

I also find your work so deeply minimal in some respects, and you aren’t prone to elaborate staged scenes. How do you feel about the editing process, whether in the studio and creating the image, choosing a layout for a book, or deciding for an audience in an exhibition.

When it comes down to it, combining photographs, how to approach a publication or an exhibition space, all of these types of editing are central to the work. Of course, there are many differences between a book and a space, but I think a book can hold a lot more different motifs or subjects and approaches.

In a space, one can turn around and pretty much take in everything in a couple of glances – at least in my shows, I make bigger prints that can still be seen from a distance. With a book, you just get a couple of photographs at a time and then the following spreads can hold surprises: I can take you through less coherent material. It is a lot of editing for sure. What do you think about this?

For me, a photographer is just a poet who is just an editor, so to speak. It’s kind of an inescapable self-selection that inevitably becomes the entirety of the practice. Do you agree?

I agree with the comparison, but it’s limited. With a poem you can, of course, change a word or move it from one line to the next but with analog photography, the whole format is fixed in one moment. But I see the similarities; one can see and read and relate to the first word at the same time as you relate to the last word, like with a photograph where you look at the corners but also at what’s at the center while never losing sight of the totality of the picture.

Are there recurring motifs or thematic elements for you?

When I started, I was my own model in the forest and I thought that I was going to do that forever. This idea of a life project was partly inspired by Cindy Sherman. I saw how she continued the same series and the beauty of that, but then it just ran out, and every time that happened something else opened up. When I’m curious about something new, I ask myself: What could it mean, and how would it play out if I try to take on this form, or this motif – something that I haven’t seen in a photograph but maybe in other media, like a cartoon or a painting or an old illustration.

What’s fascinating is that there are never that many photographs that seem possible to attempt; it’s like a handful at any given time, and if I hadn’t made them, I would probably want to make them now, but once they’re physical – once realized – I don’t think about them much. I get curious about something else. So I’m lucky because it could potentially run out, with nothing more to be done.

Considering, for instance, artificial intelligence and imaging in relation to your work: Is there a tension of possibly running out of imagery or an anxiety about technology when it comes to contemporary photography and the future of image making?

That is a complicated question. One thing I’ve tried to do with this medium is to realize within photography a somewhat familiar image that I haven’t yet seen as a photograph. Maybe I’ve seen it as, say, a fantasy illustration. In other words, I’ve been pushing towards something that is pretty hard to achieve because we’re here talking about subjects or constellations that are never going to present themselves in front of the camera unprovoked, unproduced. I’ve been prioritizing inner worlds and the imaginary while also being very grounded in everyday life and perception.

What I thirst for is something sacred emerging from something profane, or something mundane opening up to something miraculous. When computers can generate any form or constellation of forms and make it look like photograph in seconds, I appreciate that everyday-ness – that indexical closeness to the real – even more.

One of your most canonical images for me is the image of this young, striking woman biting the Mercedes-Benz hood ornament. I always think of it because it reminds me, psychoanalytically speaking, of an intrusive thought to damage or consume an object and its representation. And you’ve captured it in such a way that we’re not quite sure what she’s intending to do.

When we think about photographing something like an intrusive thought, it’s an elaborate fiction, but it could happen in reality. I actually bought a brand-new hood ornament because the one that was on this car was a little rusty. The beauty of the hood ornament to me is that it represents the physical embodiment of logo culture. With it raised vertically from the car’s front, it’s easier to interact with, like a sculpture: It’s a form that can be backlit. It lends itself to interaction. Compared to my generation, it seems like younger creators are less skeptical of representing brands. I think the photograph also, on one level, speaks to that.

The technologies of the car and the camera are easy to correlate. Is Mercedes your favorite car brand?

I’m not so good with favorites. I do think it’s interesting to look at cars before “cars” and imagine what it was like to encounter the beauty and impact of, say, 1910s automobiles, but it typically only works in the imagination. It rarely works in real life and I don’t think it really works in photography. It becomes nostalgic very quickly. Still, I think it is powerful to try to get to that place where you feel the novelty and the excitement of an earlier technology.