White Planet Black Heart

White Planet Black Heart gathers new and recent photographs by Torbjørn Rødland. It returns to the uncannily lit still lifes, portraits and staged tableaux that have made his work a touchstone for a generation of younger photographers and artists.

Published by MACK in 2020 as a 110-page hardcover, the book continues Rødland's method of treating ordinary and bodily subjects, hands, fruit, hair, teenagers, animals, with a flat, saturated clarity. They feel simultaneously clinical and charged. Cropping, lighting and a deliberately awkward formalism turn familiar images into small psychological disturbances, refusing the easy legibility of either fashion photography or straight documentary. The sequencing moves between registers, comic, tender, unsettling, without resolving into a single narrative.

Rødland (b. 1970, Stavanger, Norway) has built a body of work since the 1990s that sits between conceptual photography and a kind of vernacular surrealism. He has exhibited at the Serpentine Galleries, the Bergen Kunsthall and the Astrup Fearnley Museum, among others. Hudson Street Library also holds Rødland's Fifth Honeymoon, Sasquatch Century, Confabulations and Vanilla Partner; White Planet Black Heart is a distinct, later addition to that shelf rather than a variant of any of them.