The image has all the makings of an ordinary scene, the kind of everyday event you come across while walking down the street, looking through a store window. And yet, nothing is quite normal in Torbjørn Rødland’s photograph Barbershop Scene (2020): In the center, a woman is reclining upside down in a mint-colored barber chair, holding a newspaper in her hands, her back on the seat and her legs in the air. Behind her, a man wearing a vest and tie, with black hair gelled to his head, holds a razor in his right hand, ready to shave his customer’s legs.
At first glance, these two people appear to be caught in the middle of an action. However, their stoic postures, perfectly installed in the frame, betray a skillfully enacted staging. With a haughty stance and his left arm behind his back, like a waiter at a high-end restaurant, the man stares at the young woman’s shins, absorbed in his task like the protagonist of a genre painting. His indifference to the outside world, and to the audience, is quickly contradicted by his client’s disdainful gaze, which is fixated on the viewer. She seems to disapprove of the audience’s indiscretion. It’s here that a feeling of unease begins to make itself felt. It’s as if she’s saying: ‘You don’t belong here, go somewhere else.’
Rødland’s photograph, currently on view at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, masters this tension to perfection, keeping the viewer in a state of permanent discomfort. It provokes the shame felt by an accidental voyeur, a shame aroused from seeing something they shouldn’t have. But it also evokes a sense that one is discovering that which eludes ordinary reasoning. Most of the Norwegian photographer’s work over the past 30 years has sought these odd sensations. Rødland intervenes in the experience of common images by bringing them into the realm of the uncanny, that Freudian concept of the disquieting strangeness we feel when confronted by something just beyond reality. His models, which come from all ages and ethnicities, are photographed with the intimacy of close-up framing and soft, warm, often natural lighting. But something is always a little, or a lot, off.
Like his contemporaries Erwin Wurm and Juergen Teller, Rødland has developed an unclassifiable body of work. It’s absurd and humorous – irony and derision are often present – but it’s also a weird form of documentary photography, containing wry commentary on human relations. In Barbershop Scene, for example, we can identify a literal reversal of male-female relations: While we expect to find a male client at the barber’s for a shave, the person in the chair is a woman, and instead of presenting her face, it’s her lower body that she delivers to the razor, placing the elegant young man in the position of a vulgar shoeshine boy. As is often the case with Rødland’s work, it verges on the erotically disturbing: One might think it illustrates not only the expression ‘sex is in the air,’ but also various fetishes. The woman is wearing very tall platform heels.
Rødland once compared his photographs to tarot cards, representations that are laden with symbols and multiple possible interpretations, none of which can be categorical, verified, or rationalized. The strength of works like Barbershop Scene is that Rødland can turn multiple potential readings into a psychological funhouse mirror, one that is both bewildering and captivating, causing viewers to constantly question their own assumptions.
Torbjørn Rødland is represented by David Kordansky Gallery (Los Angeles, New York), Air de Paris (Paris), Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zurich, Seoul, Vienna), Standard (Oslo) (Oslo), and Nils Stærk (Copenhagen).
Matthieu Jacquet is a journalist and art critic based in Paris. He writes about art and fashion for Numéro and Numéro art.
Torbjørn Rødland
'Oh My God You Guys'
On view until March 31, 2024
Le Consortium, Dijon
Published November 9, 2023.