Torbjørn Rødland limits himself to film-based cameras and chemical darkroom processes, embracing the analogue roots of photography even as he challenges the separation of genres that defined its evolution throughout the 20th century. Working both in and out of the studio, his own role evolves according to the nature of the subjects he portrays. If certain images find him adopting stances informed by reportage and shooting what he encounters in the world, others involve myriad intentional decisions about casting, location, styling, and lighting. What unites the images throughout his project is the attention Rødland pays to their visual qualities, and to the differing ways that physical textures respond to light. This lends the work a painterly, abstract quality that connects it to the development of photography as a bona fide art form in the Modernist period, even when the content of the pictures establishes their relationship to the many divergent strands of contemporary culture.
In September 2020, Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway; lives and works in Los Angeles) will be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin, Texas. In 2018, he presented Fifth Honeymoon, a solo show at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, which travelled to Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, where it was on view until January 2020. Other recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017); and C/O Berlin (2017).