s Fall / Winter 06 07 - Steidl

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Torbjørn Rødland
White Planet, Black Heart
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.
Torbjørn Rødland was born in 1970 in Hafrsfjord, Norway. Since the mid-90s his photographs — and, for a few years
now, also experimental video works — have been exhibited widely. White Planet, Black Heart is his first book.
Exhibition: Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg, Norway, from June 10 through September 3, 2006.
Previously Announced
Torbjørn Rødland
White Planet, Black Heart
Texts by Gil Blank, Ina Blom and Hillary Raphael
Edited by Torbjørn Rødland and Michael Mack
Book design by Torbjørn Rødland and Catherine Lutman
112 pages, four-color throughout
7.5 x 12 in. / 19.5 x 30.5 cm
Clothbound hardcover with dustjacket
US $ 35.00 / £ 20.00 / E 30.00
ISBN 3–86521–222–0
ISBN-13 978-3-86521-222-1
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