Shane Lavalette: Tell me, when did photography come into your life?

Torbjørn Rødland: Photography was always there. In popular media, my father's private slideshows, and so on. But still in my early teens, I was more passionate about drawing. After doing caricatures and political cartoons for local newspapers, I got fed up with communicating easily decodable ideas through images. The drawings got more naïve and nonsensical, and editors found them less effective. I discovered Art and shifted focus from pen-and-ink drawing to photography. My father, who's an amateur photographer, gave me a camera early on. Maybe I was eleven. Nine years later, I saw quite clearly that my photographs were involuntarily personal, while the drawings were really just aiming to be clever and to have a fun, dynamic line.

SL: As you moved toward image making, what artists, photographers, etc., did you look at for inspiration?

TR: The first contemporary artists I could really relate to were Americans like Sherrie Levine, James Welling, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, all from "The Pictures Generation." So my starting point is the critical reconsideration of popular motifs or image types.

SL: Are you interested in clichés?

TR: The Pictures Generation taught me that popular photography has as much to tell as — if not more than — modernist art photography. It's a question of how the image is seen. I learned to look for ideology in