Title: Andy Capp Variations
Photographer/s: Torbjørn Rødland
Date of publication: February 2011
Place of publication: New York
Dimensions: 7.75 x 9.55 in.
Edition size: 500
Type of binding: soft cover, saddle-stitched
Number of pages: 32
Type of printing: b/w & 4 color offset
Printer: Magnum Offset
Publisher: Hassla Books
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-9825471-6-8
Category: artist book
Price: $25
Summary: Rødland employs the comic strip character of Andy Capp as the starting point for a series of small-scale black and white photographs. Repeating the same drawn image of this character, these photographs seem motivated by an interest in nivellation; an attempt at having the photographs neither appear as portrait, nor landscape, nor still life.
Andy Capp Variations could both be seen as a hard return to repetition and as an attempt to dissolve the classical genres that Rødland has been preoccupied with in recent years: the still life, the portrait and the landscape photography. These recent photographs apparently relish the arbitrary combination of elements from all the above genres. In isolating this pleasure from reason, Rødland would claim, these photographs are ‘perverted’: “Perverted photography doesn’t sell a product or communicate a message. It’s not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It’s layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic”. Thus these photographs take an obvious interest in a limited play: the staccato insistence on the same image on the one hand and the continuous and restless re-contextualizing of the very same image on the other.
Website: www.rodland.net
Book link: www.hasslabooks.com
Donated by: Hassla Books
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