Torbjørn Rødland’s *The Model* treats its title as an open question rather than a job description. Published by MACK in 2017 as a 128-page printed paper hardback, the book gathers 75 colour plates and 8 duotone plates made over a period of roughly ten years, with Malgosia Bela—Polish actress and fashion model—recurring throughout.

The photographs were made in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Warsaw, Oslo and Lofoten, and they decline to settle into a single register. Critical appropriation, diaristic snapshot, reportage, commercial work and staged pictures sit side by side, held together less by style than by a face. Bela is shown interacting with images, becoming images, being images—Rødland’s own formulation—and the book consequently reads as an argument about how photographs are made and how they circulate.

That argument has occupied Rødland since the mid-1990s: how to work through the filters that arbitrate our relationship with people, objects and pictures, and whether photography can still reach psychological, erotic and spiritual registers. *The Model* is sensual and cerebral at once. Each image lands somewhere between alienation and intimacy, and stays there.

For a collection, what recommends the book is less any single plate than the accumulation: a decade of one collaboration, edited into a sequence that tests the conventions it borrows. Rødland has described it as a love letter both to a medium and to a mediated woman, and that double address is the point. It sits naturally with holdings in contemporary Nordic photography, in portraiture that interrogates its own genre, and in photobooks where photographic language is deliberately put under strain.