Tørbjorn Rødland: I Want to Live Innocent

In his first monograph, White Planet, Black Heart, the Norway-based photographer Torbjørn Rødland, who was born in 1970, traveled far and wide to capture a mélange of nostalgic, cliché driven images that are so over-the-top and eclectic in subject matter, they cause us to reconsider what we think we know about photography. An unsheathed black banana shares a spread with a Romantic shot of the Nordic coastline, a black and- white image of pine trees growing from the roof of a country cottage is solo and another spread features two scantily clad models lounging in the wild. With I Want to Live Innocent, Rødland returns to his hometown of Stavanger. The center of Norway’s oil industry, this sleepy Protestant city on the coast has undergone tremendous economic growth since the 60s, giving rise to a newfound wealth and materialism. Rødland captures these paradoxes with his characteristic range.