There are a lot of pretty girls in Norwegian photographer Torbjrn Rdland’s work. Yet his interest in melancholic eroticism is just one aspect of a complicated practice which touches on the meaning and process of photography. Much of his current work seems to be pushing the limits of the body – how it can be twisted and contorted, how skin can be drawn on, covered up, transformed. Working fluidly in colour and black-and-white, Rdland, like Ryan McGinley, has managed to create images accepted by both the “cool” press and art establishment. This January Rdland opens an exhibition in Copenhagen focusing on American landscapes and presidents, especially Reagan and Kennedy. “I’m fascinated by how quickly chaotic reality becomes mythologised. The Ronald Reagan I got to know through news media as a kid is not the same Ronald Reagan children today are introduced to,” he points out. Here Rdland talks to Dazed about his fascination with Americana and our Instagram world.

What do you find interesting about referencing and exploring ideas around Americana?

I’ve always felt connected to American vulgarity – in poetry, pantheism, rock’n’roll and hip hop. Studying visual cultures of Japan, Scandinavia and North America helps me figure out what I’m about and where I can take my photography.

Why did you end up in LA?

I gave up on all the alternatives. Los Angeles is a good mix of villages, cities and nature. And it’s founded on mythology. I don’t know how the place is influencing the work exactly, but I know myself better now than before moving here. I cannot promise that I’ll end up in California though.

Tell me about the role of construction in your images. Are things ‘found’ or are you more interested in creating things to feel ‘found’?

Probably both, but definitely the latter! One problem with so-called ‘staged photography’ is the look of these didactic tableaus, making it very clear that you’re studying a construction. It doesn’t really matter to me how the photograph came into being. The important question is how to see it: how the photograph asks to be read. I can be equally invested in an object I just found as one I waited six months to get or travelled from continent to continent with, but in general it helps to live with it for a while. I typically keep something around for months before dealing with it photographically. Situations with people are always sessions. I decide the clothes and so on. I never just pull out a camera and start ‘shooting’. You can wait around your whole life for something interesting to happen in front of you. I believe in forcing a more active approach.

Yet despite this there is a quietness to your work – is that something you strive for?

No, that comes naturally. My physiognomy is quiet. I strive for action and for the work to speak up.

How and why did you start working with people in contorted positions?

Well, maybe it’s an early sign of decadence if I tire of human figures in more relaxed positions. I hope not. I always try to stretch the medium, to push at the limitations of what I can do within straight photography. Having photographed people for more than ten years, maybe I had to push and bend more drastically to stay interested.

Tell me about your latest book. Why did you call it Vanilla Partner?

The title was free. There were no albums, books or even a kinky movie named Vanilla Partner. And it says something about a relationship I find myself in: photography is my straight partner. I try to introduce fantasy and religion to it, but it’s not easy.

You also seem to be really interested by texture at the moment – something sticky, fluffy, visceral. What is attracting to you to that tactility?

It’s all we have. A painter has the texture of the picture itself, the tactility of paint on canvas. In photography the focus is on how other surfaces are represented photographically. I always look at what painters do.

In a lot of your earlier images you represented women in nature – it’s a classic romantic concept. Were you interested in playing with that art historical heritage?

I don’t play with or reference art history; I see myself as adding to it. To photograph beautiful women in nature was a challenge, partly because it’s inflamed, both aesthetically and politically. I like to think that my images take active part in a discussion on how and what they mean. This was a central aspect of the project from the very beginning. To link a primate to nature makes perfect sense. The real problems start when you say she doesn’t also represent culture, and clearly I’ve never gone there.

What attracts you to depicting femininity in particular? Do you feel there's a tension there as a man?

Yes, the tension can be different – also in a wider sense. Everyone loves and hates pictures of young women. It’s intense! Most people seem so caught up in their own bodies and personal perspectives on this material that they cannot see it for what it is.

A number of the images in Vanilla Partner depict people being drawn or painted or tattooed on. How did this motif develope and what the idea was behind it?

I think it developed from black-metal corpse paint. Back in 2001 I photographed leading musicians on the Norwegian metal scene. Looking at my portraits of Frost (of Satyricon), Abbath (of Immortal) and Infernus (of Gorgoroth) started me thinking about the psychological implications of paint on skin. There’s also a smaller photograph from the following year... it has a German title: Goldene Trnen. This is a portrait of a young woman with lines of honey on her face. An art historian will probably see it in the Catholic tradition of the crying virgin, while a dude reading Dazed online is more likely to see a facial. I’m drawn to pictures that cannot easily be pinned down. I like conflicting readings – I think you find truth there. But to return to the question: there was no initial idea behind all this – maybe more of a longing. I now see painting on skin as an immediate escape from the confusion and boredom of everyday life. Hairless apes have always listened to music and painted their bodies to make life more real. It’s linked to a spiritual longing that is everywhere in my work.

How do you feel about the ubiquity of image culture today, compared to when you started working with photography?

Younger people today seem unburdened by the quantity of photographic images being produced. This, of course, is a healthy attitude. There will always be a need for subtle reformulation. The situation when I started was more anorexic. Reality seemed lost behind an excessive overproduction of photographs. The postmodern mindset saw no reason to make new pictures; we had already produced too many. Reappropriation was almost a moral choice. It’s funny; looking back, the early 1990s now seem like a calm period of libraries and magazines, before the online explosion of Instagram, Tumblr and TwitPics. Today I see Instagram feeds adopting strategies from critical art filtered through the Fail Blog perspective on commodity culture. It’s quite exciting and I’m not contributing.

Your approach has been emulated by a younger generation of photographers, including those working with fashion as much as within an art context. Is that a frustrating or interesting situation for you?

We both know that fashion photographers adopt anything that moves to a beat. I’m actually more puzzled by the massive number of educated young art-photographers who approach the world like an Alec Soth. I always saw my material as coming out of a culture just as much as being the product of my conflicting personality. So I do not claim full ownership.

What do you think the role of emotion is in photography? Is it something you strive to create in your viewer or your images?

That is a very good question – I’m still struggling with it. Asking for an emotional reaction is asking to entertain or to sell something. This, at least, is the standard view. My more emotional photographs are created to make the viewer reflect, but I’ve also seen them have an emotional effect on people and that didn’t seem all wrong. Actually, it didn’t seem wrong at all.

Vanilla Partner by Torbjrn Rdland is out now, published by MACK

rodland.net

There’s no two ways about it: George Saunders is one of the greatest living writers of fiction in America now. Since his scorching debut collection in 1996, he’s stuck with admirable firmness to his short-fiction guns, publishing only stories and novellas, almost all of which take place in either the contemporary US or a harrowingly shit-awful, worryingly near-futuristic version of it. Saunders’ stories tend to be faultless masterclasses in sentence-perfect brevity, hilariously dismal corporate language and that weird unquantifiable thing that squishes up your heart and makes you do embarrassing involuntary audible laugh-sobs in public. He is a MacArthur-Fellowship-certified proper genius and we were pleased as punch to get to talk to him about his forthcoming collection Tenth of December, which might be his best one yet.

Congratulations on such a head-spinningly good new collection! Your publishers are calling this one your ‘most accessible collection yet’. Do you think that's right?
I think it is more accessible. By which I mean, maybe, that a person who isn’t necessarily a big reader of contemporary short fiction could dive right in and find something in it. Lately I’ve been writing these non-fiction travel pieces and have noticed that a lot of very bright, engaged people I know, who don’t really get my fiction, seemed drawn in by these. So I had that goal in mind – to, where possible, reach out – put up a bigger tent, so to speak.

There’s a pleasing structure to this new one. Do you set out to write a cohesivecollection, or do you just do one story at a time until you've got enough to lump together into a book? When does it become a book?
I don’t have a big, overarching idea for a collection when I start out, no. I try to keep my focus on the small stuff – on the sentences, on keeping the energy high – trusting that the greater whole – story, then book - will take care of itself: it will be coming directly from the subconscious and therefore will have some sort of cohesion. It’s what I think of as a ‘seed crystal’ approach, like in biology class: start with something small and let it accrete organically outward. Using this approach, you can sometimes outwit that simplistic/thematic guy inside yourself.

We’ve always been brimful of admiration at your sticking exclusively to short fiction. But will there ever be a novel?
I think there might be. But not if it would cause you to stop admiringme. Ha. No – I try not to have too many ideas about what I might do/might not do/should do. My hope is just to follow my own natural energy and interest and see what happens. So far, the natural DNA of my writing has been inclined toward brevity. It may be a version of that sports idea, that there are fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles – maybe there’s something similar re: prose style? I imagine my stories as little wind-up toys: wind them up, put them down, they go directly under the couch. I would like to write a novel, just because – at least here in the States – there’s a certain level of cultural and critical attention that seems reserved for that form.

You've said before that it's the improvisatory quality that attracts you to the story form: the way you can start out and not know how you're going to end up. Don’t you know what you’re doing from the outset a bit more these days?
It’s changed a little. In some cases now I have a sort of pre-sense of what I need to make a story – usually just these broad action/escalation markers. If I can figure those out in advance, I can engage that improvisatory energy in figuring out how I get from one marker to the next. In Tenth of December, ‘Victory Lap’ and the title story were written like that – the rest were pretty much improvisations.I love that Gerald Stern quote: ‘If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking – then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.’ Or, as Einstein said it, in his slightly more snooty manner: ‘No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.’ So the trick is to keep the conscious, conceptual mind at bay and thus stay open to mystery, revelation etc.

So the character who turns out to be narrating his story from beyond the grave, for instance: did you know he was going to end up dead when you started out?
No, I didn’t know that. I actually wrote about 100 pages of that story where he lived and actually did escape, before reeling it back in and finding out he was dead/had to die.

You've done quite a bit of dead people speaking or acting, post-mortem: ghosts, disintegrating zombie aunties, narrators who’ve already killed themselves in the most horrifying way possible. Why do you think you keep coming back to this talky-dead business?
There are probably all sorts of thematic implications and so on – but for me the main reason for writing about ghosts is the little rush of pleasure I get from doing it. And I hope that pleasure shows up in the quality of the prose, and also takes the story in an unexpected direction – a story will often take an intriguing turn while you are occupying yourself with making the language energetic.

And why all the futuristic stuff?
My futuristic tendencies are more a means to an end – I want to write about human tendencies at the end conditions. Like in a science experiment: if you want to know something about a concrete beam, put it under extreme stress. One can do that pretty handily in an alternate world.

The other thing we see a lot in this alternate world is this constant anxiety about poverty. You're writing about the richest country on earth, but almost all of your characters are dirt-poor and fretting like mad about it. Not exactly The Great Gatsby, is it?
Well, I think that’s the real American story: the severe divide between the rich and the poor, and the cost the poor pay in grace and ease, and how untroubled the rich are about that. Just about every American life below a certain level is dominated by work and the depredations caused by far to talk about sex or religion or even a small disgusting goitre we have in some private place.

Legal and thoroughly depressing mind-altering drugs come into play a lot in Tenth of December. Is America’s dependence on pharmaceutical drugs an issue you're particularly worried about, or are drugs just a good device for a story for you?
The latter. I loved the opportunities those drugs gave me to write in different registers. I’d made a living out of writing in a sort of stripped-down, vernacular minimalism, and sometimes feel like busting out – ergo, drugs. In the story, that is.

You’ve said before that you came late to literature and that your scientific background (studying and working in the field of geophysical engineering) meant that your writing was “Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.” Do you still feel like the welder, or do you admit by now that you’re basically Karl Lagerfeld?
No, some things die hard. I was poorly trained as a reader and I think will always suffer for that. So what I’m trying to do is make that malformation to work for me, ie make really cool metal-dresses.

It’s kind of reassuring that the final sentiment of the new book – in the acknowledgements in the back where you thank your daughters – is, ‘Goodness is not only possible, it is our natural state.’ It’s way-grim in the world of your fiction, and outside of it much of the time; are you really optimistic about the world your kids are going to inherit?
I don’t think I’m optimistic or pessimistic – these are both versions of the same disease, the disease of wanting to say, ‘Oh, I see how life is (all good/all bad) – now I can stop thinking and worrying about it and interrogating it.’ I will say, however, that one of the revelations I’ve had over the last few years is that goodness is possible and attainable – that we do have the power to move ourselves in the direction of openness and awareness and so on. And that there are remarkable people in the world who are inclined – through disposition and/or training – to positive vision and action.

Cool. What about Ben Stiller? Didn’t he buy the rights to one of your stories, and wasn’t he going to direct and star in it, and you’ve written the screenplay, and oh-God-please let’s have that film soon, please? What’s going on with that?
I think that’s not happening. I wrote one for Ben Stiller that came very close but the signals I’m getting is that that ship has sailed. Or sunk. So we will just have to watch the movies that our minds make. Eesh. That sounds like a bad self-help book: Improving the Movies Our Minds Make: Reinventing Your Inner Tape Loop.

Tenth of December is published by Bloomsbury on January 3