Torbjørn Rødland: White Planet, Black Heart

L: Church n°1, 2003 R: Untitled (Illness), 2005 © Torbjørn Rødland Norwegian photographer and experimental video artist Torbjørn Rødland has a lot of intriguing work. I was reminded of him when I noticed that he had a photograph in the exhibition I went to last week. When I first saw his book White Planet, Black Heart (published by Steidl), I fell in love. Or was it lust?

Torbjørn Rødland is to photography what the Pet Shop Boys are to pop music: a master of the delicately orchestrated cliché overload, a surcharge of the too obvious, too cute or too inane, played to the point where the images are drained of all trace of common sense and suggest a new sense of silence or mystery. Rødland has a knack for producing images that make you ask what are, in fact, appropriate motives for art photography: Images of single audio or video cassettes? Bleak black and white renditions of countryside churches? George W. Bush’s favourite ice cream? A black banana? Girls and pets, pets and girls? He creates a complex of readings that inveigles the viewer into spending time with each single image, to reconsider its meaning and relevance. White Planet, Black Heart makes no excuses as it reinvents the romantic impulses of popular culture.