TRANSITIONAL STATES

In Ola Rindal’s photography, things seem perpetually on the verge of slipping away. Through a raw yet refined and nuanced aesthetic, a poetry of the everyday emerges, infused with understated melancholy. 

Ola’s images may seem accidental, as if taken by someone getting a lucky shot with their first camera. But upon closer inspection, they reveal an artist in full command of his craft and intention. In the fleeting and coincidental nature of everyday life, he uncovers hidden moments, transforming them into images of enigmatic beauty. 

Ola's venture into photography began with a stolen key and a borrowed camera. The key was to his school’s darkroom, and the camera belonged to his father. Growing up in Lillehammer, in the Norwegian countryside, there was little else to do, so he and his friends experimented in the darkroom and shot with his father’s camera for fun. 

“I got bitten by the photography bug that way,” he says when we speak with him in January 2025 about his images shot with the BF camera. “I was quite shy, and photography became my way of speaking.” 

He never considered any other forms of artistic expression. There was just something about photography that clicked for him. “At first, it allowed me to let things out. But over time, I realized photography is about saying something about my world and how I see it.”

When asked how he arranges his images into a series for an exhibition or a book, he says he doesn’t think in terms of stories that much. He is more concerned with creating a rhythm. His approach is similar to putting together a poetry collection. “It’s about creating a feeling. And by arranging the images in a certain way, you compose a mood rather than a narrative,” he says.

Today, Ola lives in Paris with his family, working on commissions for top fashion brands and magazines. But his true joy comes from capturing the everyday world—whether it’s the streets of Paris or Tokyo, or the snowy countryside of Norway.

So, what does he look for when shooting? “True moments,” he says. And he continues,“I want something to happen that I find interesting. Like a bird landing on a branch, a small light on a wall, or a deer suddenly appearing in a clearing, creating a magical atmosphere. I look for things that don’t happen twice.”

These are moments that, in his eyes, have a sense of enigma. He says he generally gravitates toward “the spaces in between” and adds that, for him, the beautiful is “often very close to the ugly.”

Ultimately, Ola Rindal’s photography is about a certain tension—creating images that leave questions lingering in the viewer’s mind. It’s about the fascination that images or works of art evoke, making us see everyday things in a slightly new light.