Confabulations takes its title from a neurological term: the production of fabricated or distorted memories, made without conscious intent to deceive. Torbjørn Rødland’s book, published by MACK in 2016, applies that condition to photography. Across 112 pages and 64 colour plates, the images are analogue, but they do not document. They misrepresent—subtly, deliberately—broken memories and childhood fantasies. The distortion is not an error to be corrected; it is a method for getting closer to something true.

Rødland treats fragmentation neither as a problem nor as a stylistic effect. It is a starting point for new connections. As Ina Blom has written of his work, subjectivity is not the master signifier of the image; it is one point of connectivity among many. The camera—its lenses, apertures, lighting, film stocks—is another. What results is not a retreat into abstraction but a reshuffling of texture and surface. The emphatic sheen, the sleek glamour, the casual perversity: these qualities acquire an independent existence as new textural realities, as if to describe a material world we can never fully know.

The book’s distinctive character lies in that unitary approach. Rødland does not assemble a portfolio of unrelated provocations. He builds a sequence in which each picture participates in the same inquiry, and the accumulative effect is less about individual images than about the space between them. Beneath the flood of disposable images that surrounds us, he is looking for a new soul—not a return to sincerity, but a way of making photographs that acknowledge their own fabricated nature.

For collectors, Confabulations is significant less for any claim of rarity than for its position within contemporary photographic thinking. It is a MACK book by an artist whose analogue practice has consistently tested the medium’s relationship to memory, desire, and materiality. The 21.6 x 28 cm format and the 64 colour plates give the work a deliberate, object-like presence. It is a book to be read as an argument, not merely browsed as a collection of pictures.