Backlit Rainbow: Torbjørn Rødland in conversation with Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Artist portraits by Eddie Chacon
Photographs by Torbjørn Rødland
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and Fondazione Prada
Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

For the past 20 years, Norwegian-born, Los Angeles based photographer Torbjørn Rødland has been creating images that pervert and sabotage the medium via tableaux rife with symbolism. They are suggestive, ominous, backlit hallucinations of the unconscious - at times violent and horrifying and other times his phantasmagoric scenes are desperate pleas to for surrender and tender forgiveness - a begging and praying for touch, to belong, and to exist. This summer, there are three major exhibitions of Rødland’s work: The Touch That Made You at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Fifth Honeymoon at Bergen Kunsthall, and Backlit Rainbow at David Kordansky Gallery, his first significant solo exhibition in Los Angeles. On the occasion of these exhibitions, we present two interviews of one of the most important practitioners of postmodern photography.

OLIVER MAXWELL KUPPER: How does it feel to be back in Norway?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: It’s good. It’s not that I’ve been totally gone for a while…I do spend a quarter of every year here. In the last year even more. A lot of things are happening in Europe: shows, meetings. If things are spread out with a week or two in between things I need to attend, I just hang out in Oslo instead of coming back to Los Angeles and messing more with every cell in my body than I have to. 

KUPPER: I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing in Norway…what were you like as a kid? Were you creative or studious? Did you have a lot of friends or were you pretty introverted?

RØDLAND: It’s the classical story of being more comfortable being in my own mind. I didn’t even see it as being creative or label it as that, I was just really into making drawings nonstop. I would run out of paper constantly so my parents bought me these… I don’t know what they’re called in English… but it’s like a board with a thin plastic layer on top so when you pull it down it sticks to the ground and it becomes like a drawing. There was the joy of moving the pen over the surface and seeing the drawing happen. I was also really fascinated by advertising…that type of aesthetic. I was attracted to the photography.

KUPPER: Were these magazines imported from other countries in Europe or were they Norwegian magazines?

RØDLAND: They were like the Norwegian versions of Reader’s Digest. My grandparents would sometimes have a little child-friendly format… there would be these full page ads thrown in there.

KUPPER: So that was sort of your earliest connection to that aesthetic and discovery of the photographic medium.

RØDLAND: Yeah but also my father’s amateur photography magazines.

KUPPER: What does your father do?

RØDLAND: He worked himself up through the system of the post office. He started as a delivery, mail man, and then he worked himself up to being the position of being head of the office.

KUPPER: Were your parents supportive of you as an artist?

RØDLAND: Not really. They had a more limited idea of what was possible for their child so I didn’t listen to the advice I got, which was a recipe for getting a hobby or a recipe for mediocrity. The advice would be to get a steady job and a house and then work on your hobby in the basement and then maybe gradually make a living out of it and quit your day job if that happens.

KUPPER: That seems like a very boring…for an artist…

RØDLAND: It’s a very bad strategy to become a professional artist… to not believe in it. I totally understand where they were coming from, they gave the best advice that they could from their background and experiences.

KUPPER: What do they think about the work you’re making now?

RØDLAND: It’s hard to know. They were probably more into it in the beginning when it was more landscape based and also taking on the challenge of daring to be romantic in the very beginning. I think that they see that I’m doing well. When the queen is okay with what I’m doing, I think they’re okay with it. It’s the effect of when someone with an established authority puts an okay on it, it’s a little bit easier.

KUPPER: You’re showing now in Norway but you’ve been developing photographs in a lab downtown for the new show.

RØDLAND: Printing… It’s a different process. There can be many years in between developing and printing. So straight after a session, as I call it, I take the negative— the exposed film, rather— to a lab on Wilshire and then I have the film processed and I get analog contact  sheets made until it’s time to include something from that book in a session or an exhibition. That’s when I do the next step and actually make a print.

KUPPER: So if you’re printing in 2018 you could’ve taken that photo a couple of years ago?

RØDLAND: Yeah. It can be 10 years ago. The show I’m putting up in Los Angeles, there’s one negative that’s more than 10 years old.

KUPPER: I want to talk about the temperature in your photography. You can feel the heat or feel the cold in the subject matter, light, or tone. Is this intentional when you’re photographing? Can you describe the psychosomatic nature of your work?

RØDLAND: I probably don’t think of it…or maybe I do think of it as temperature sometimes…or just that I want it to have a warmth or to break through the dreariness of flat, front-lit photographs for instance. The lighting is very important, but of course it always is in photography. When I print I strive for more of a neutral feel in the colors, but very often there are different color sources. The low back lighting has a bit of a glow that feels warm, I guess.

KUPPER: And it’s sort of intimidating.

RØDLAND: The light or the way that the object appears? 

KUPPER: I think both, with some of the images that are backlit. There’s something religious about it…exalting the subject in some way.

RØDLAND: I do try to push things out of the profane…to make it more interesting, to give it another value, another focus. 

KUPPER: I think that photography is one of the only mediums that sort of can elicit that response. I mean painting and other mediums can sometimes, but photography has this sort of multidimensional element to it. Would you agree with that?

RØDLAND: I think it can, or maybe it works because it’s always balanced in my case against something that’s almost banal or almost like a cheap trick. Of course, in painting, it’s easier to go all the way into that space, but then maybe it becomes too much and you can’t really handle it. Maybe the painting seems banal or out of touch with the contemporary world. My starting point is the ridiculousness of having artistic ambitions with photography and moving from there and actually believing that a photograph can do a lot and hoping that the images can have some value. Going from this thin, banal piece of paper and then allowing myself to really believe in it and invest in it and project myself into it.

KUPPER: Has your relationship to photography changed or evolved since you started?

RØDLAND: It’s hard to know because I feel that I understand more and more what I’m doing with the medium and that’s a very exciting process in itself because I have an analytical side, but I also have an intuitive side. I let the intuitive side make the decision and then the analytical side is allowed to figure out the whys and the outcomes in retrospect. I understand more and more the choices that I’ve done earlier…they can take a while. Also, the need to not repeat anything because it’s not fun to make the same photograph that I’ve already produced. A lot of pictures that, if I tried to make them now, if I haven’t already then, I don’t think I can improve them. So of course, I have to do something else. There’s a moment where there’s a push… when the interest of curiosity in one motif or aesthetic or challenge is closed by the fact that I’ve been there and done it. Then there’s something else that opens. The curiosity is squeezed out in a new way. At any point in time, there’s maybe like five photographs that seem possible to make. Then once I do them, other possibilities open up.  Other channels open up.

KUPPER: Would you say that you’re prolific in your ideas or does it take a while for your ideas to develop?

RØDLAND: There are ideas, I just don’t think they’re good ideas. It’s more about trying to make something good based on bad ideas, just by investing myself in it and just by focusing on execution.

KUPPER: In your interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, he mentioned that you made a film in Los Angeles and you didn’t go into much detail about that. Can you talk a little bit about the film you made and is it the first film you made in Los Angeles?

RØDLAND: The last film that I did, before this one, was in 2007. There’s been an 11 year break. It was with a person that I met in Los Angeles, but that one was made in Norway. Between 2004 and 2007 I made 6 videos and now, after 11 year…it’s almost like I’m continuing where I left off in making a film that is partly filmed in the same place as the last place in Norway and the other part is filmed in Los Angeles.

KUPPER: Where in Los Angeles was it filmed?

RØDLAND: The main part—I don’t even know what it’s called. This young boy who’s the protagonist, he lives in San Diego, and he came first to my studio in Burbank to record a song. And then I drove halfway to San Diego and found a place on the map. Then we were thrown out by this bar before we got to filming. Then we just drove and found a place on the side of the road— so I don’t even know where we were. There’s maybe just one image from that recording session in the studio.

KUPPER: It seems like Los Angeles just keeps going and going and going. It’s a massive city.  How long have you been living in Los Angeles?

RØDLAND: My first visit was in 2006 and then for the next couple of years, six single months. And then one or two months in Tokyo, Berlin, and Oslo. I always had a ticket to go somewhere else. And then that stopped in 2010, after a stay in Tokyo and Oslo, I moved to Los Angeles.

KUPPER: Your show coming up at David Kordansky Gallery is called Backlit Rainbow….where did that title come from?

RØDLAND: There’s some rainbow colored objects in the show, there’s quite a few of them. There are couplings in the images…men with other men…there’s more of a male focus. The inspiration for those images was mainly Japanese Boys’ Love comics and that aesthetic, which is interestingly enough produced by and for younger women. And of course there’s the idea of the backlit rainbow, which is not really possible. The show also has what could be called gay material. But I get these titles from my notebook…I have a list. So when I am looking for a title for a show or for a book, I just go to the list and see if there is something that fits.

KUPPER: It’s called Boys’ Love…is it anime?

RØDLAND: Yeah it’s a genre. It started out in general fiction and then became a theme in manga. The film that we didn’t talk that much about has an anime element and a Japanese voice over in a cute female voice, an anime style voice over.

KUPPER: Can you talk a little bit about the film?

RØDLAND: I don’t start with what it’s about, I start with these elements that I’m curious about. I’m more or less surprised to find that it’s actually about something. Another element….is a musical element. I looked for the right song for a long time and I stumbled upon it in Banff, Canada. There’s a musical art center and they were having a performance of musical by a young Canadian musician and I decided one of the songs. But for my movie I didn’t know who was going to sing it. Casting is strange for me. I typically don’t cast for a specific part, so I cast a really wide net. Ages 9 to 95, both genders, all ethnicities and 600 people submitted something. I listened to pretty much every song and asked six people to record the song itself and then I ended up with a 10 year old white boy. 

KUPPER: Interesting.

RØDLAND: It’s the type of creativity that’s characteristic of a photographer— it’s hard for me to walk into a room and sort of sculpt something out of a mountain of clay. I’m more accustomed to choosing objects and seeing things, being interested in something and being curious about something I’m seeing. Then, combining it. Combining these elements and pushing them into meaning something more… It’s the same thing with this film, all of these elements coming together and then it’s hard to know exactly what the film should be until I put it together.

KUPPER: It’s somewhere between a puzzle and a collage.

RØDLAND: Yeah, but it’s definitely neither because it’s not made for you to work your way through it to one pre-fixed answer or solution. That’s never the case. It doesn’t celebrate fragmentation, it doesn’t try to make a whole out of these parts. It shouldn’t feel collage-y.

KUPPER: Your show in Milan right now, The Touch That Made You, a lot of your photographs deal with touching or a sense of touch whether it’s human to human, or object to human, where does this obsession with touch come from?

RØDLAND: Isn’t it just very human? Aren’t we all into touch? There’s so many different ways of answering this question, but of course trying to bring photography out of a headspace and purely analytical space and into a more tactile quality, which is some of the qualities of the early 20th century art photography that I just found missing in the post-modern photography I was studying. Trying to see if I can move from this analytical art and into something more tactile and widen the scope and to open it up to a wider branch of human experiences and approaches to the world. It’s an integral project of not rejecting the position that came before me and building on it and trying to deepen it.

KUPPER: I think that a lot of photography can have a lack of empathy and your photography is very empathetic. I think postmodern photography has completely changed and almost diverged into different parallel histories, especially with digital photography. It seems like empathy is something that’s missing in a lot of past photographic movements.

RØDLAND: You could say that interiority was missing. It wasn’t about looking inside yourself, it was about cultural forms and institutions and having a critical eye. For my photographic practice, that was deliberately cut out to achieve something, to try to take a step in a progressive direction. To get away from something emotionally based, blind conservative opinions that was holding us back. That was part of the philosophy that relates to Foucault.

KUPPER: When you’re creating an image, it seems like you’re finding the image as you create its tableaux. Are you surprised by the final result or is the final image something you imagined?

RØDLAND: That’s partly why I work on film…so I don’t see what I’m doing. I’m always balancing on the edge of failure. There’s always this balance of control, choosing the stage and what people are wearing, and experimenting with light and things. Say there’s a person helping me there, I sort of depend on them to bring something outside of what I could have imagined. It’s very vague, it’s more this curiosity about a constellation of objects. I always have a starting point that’s pushed away from the ordinary. Then it becomes all about seeing what works. I don’t really know what the end result is or what the best version is until I see the contact sheets a couple of days later. Sometimes I don’t even see it then, I just have to sleep on it for a couple of nights. Then I see what frame that’s in front of my eyes, internally, when I wake up in the morning. Maybe one image seems a bit irritating and that’s the one that sticks and has this miraculous power. So I’m pretty careful in choosing to make sure that I don’t go with some kind of preconceived idea of what it should be, but what has the strongest result. It’s about giving up what I thought I was going to make and embracing what I did actually make.

KUPPER: It’s sort of instinctual in a way…finding out which image haunts you the most.

RØDLAND: Yeah or I let it run its course. It’s a way of gradually becoming aware of what I’m interested in. A lot of this is bringing things into consciousness, so I may not know why I want to make this photograph, but then it also makes sense that I don’t know exactly what it should be. Let the intuition choose and lead the way.

KUPPER: Back to a sense of touch, it seems like you use different senses than traditionally used when taking pictures.

RØDLAND: Well it still has to be challenged… they are linked. I think you get to that tactility by describing surfaces really intensely, which goes with the sense of sight which is the first sense that I’m working with and then I try to evoke other senses through photographs.

KUPPER: My last question has to do with perversion, because you’re perverting the medium in a way. The photographic medium and the history of photography. Where does that perversion come from?

RØDLAND: It’s not just a need to be free of rationality or conventions, to pursue the pleasure of photography. It’s a pleasure thats free of rationality. I think that’s very linked to a very basic artistic push or artistic need. When I first used the word perversion, I tried to use it as more in this way. Of course once the word is out there, two weeks later it’s back to mean its most common meaning, which is also okay. I mean I picked it up because I read The Pleasure Of The Text by Roland Barthes. It’s about text and not his classic book about photography, text of course which is his own medium…I found that a much more relevant book to me and my own work.

KUPPER: Instead of his theories on photography?

RØDLAND: Probably because he deals with 20th century reportage or snapshot photography and he doesn’t deal with photography during or after the postmodern. In his book on text, it’s very contemporary, he talks about the perverse text…that the text is there for the pleasure, the pleasure of the text. It’s a perverse text that’s not doing some job for society, but it has this freedom that it’s being there for some pleasure, which is much more relatable to my photography.