torbjørn rødland

INNOCENCE AND ARTIFICE

We invited the Norwegian artist and photographer Torbjørn Rødland to send us images illustrating his vision of glamour today. He responded with portraits of young, seemingly innocent women, whose expressions evoke ecstatic religious Madonnas. These faces appear suspended between devotion and surrender, beauty and suffering, as if marked by the silent violence of the cult of beauty and its global industry.

These photographs resonate strongly today, as new generations measure themselves against their own filtered images. Today’s faces are endlessly modified by filters on social media and calibrated according to algorithmic ideals of perfection.

Rødland’s portraits expose the tension between innocence and artifice, devotion and alienation, revealing how the new glamour operates as both a dream and a form of quiet suffering.

— Olivier Zahm

 

ALL ARTWORK COURTESY OF THE ARTIST