I write this with warmth, as it is the only way I know how to write about this man.

Three years ago I interviewed Yvan Rodic, better known as Face Hunter. For those who do not follow the lives of the blogger jet-set, Yvan Rodic is a streetstyle-photographer-slash-blogger. He is in-fact one of the most prolific and well-known streetstyle bloggers of his time.

This summer Yvan returned to Oslo once again, this time for the book signing of his second book “A Year in the Life of Face Hunter”. In this three-year period between then and now Yvan Rodic has traveled the world several times over. He has become even warmer and even more himself than ever before. His sharp edges have softened somewhere between those hundreds of airport stops. In his lifetime Yvan Rodic has seen and experienced more countries that most people will ever do. He has travelled so much that he had to cut out some countries from his new book because there were just too many of them.

The symbiosis of our friendship goes like this: I guess some people were meant to live the most extraordinary lives. People like me were meant to watch quietly from the sidelines and write about it.

The following conversation happened three years ago.

A CONVERSATION WITH YVAN RODIC
Oslo, June 2010

Yvan Rodic is sitting in my bed, his computer on his lap, his shirt unbuttoned. Had this been a few months ago I think I would have found this to be one of the strangest situations I have ever been in, but a few months changes things and suddenly this is my reality. I still decide to take a picture of him, with my window as a backdrop just because. I fiddle with the voice recording function on my iPhone. Yvan is handsome. Not in the normal way, but in a very unreal way. He reminds me of a caricature – long spindly legs, a classic button-up shirt, Mick Jagger lips and the brightest blue eyes that I have ever seen, topped with hair that reminds me of a cartoon from the fifties – it just kinds of poofs up over his forehead. I’ve watched him fix his hair a couple of times by now, but I still wonder how he keeps it there.

I’ve been able to follow him around the past few months both in London and in Oslo, and I’ve been able to call him my friend, although I’ve never really felt that I had him more than 40% at any time. His mind was always elsewhere, his eyes were always scanning his surroundings, and his hand was always reaching for his camera or his laptop. As I followed him around and watched him take pictures I used to theorize how he was in other countries, in other situations, followed around by other girls. I’ve asked him if he gets lonely with his job, but he always answers with a matter-of-fact ‘no’. The truth is, I was the one that got lonely when I followed him around, on his endless search for that something.

But back to reality. Here he was, sitting on my bed, ready to be interviewed. He has a cold. He looks a little tired, but apparently he always looks a little tired. I tell him that it gives him character. He laughs his deep laugh. His laugh, like his gaze, is a little bit dark. His jokes, like his humor, are a little bit harsh. He doesn’t waste his words. In fact, It’s easy for a softie like me to distrust him. There’s just something about him that seems impenetrable. I get a little bit nervous, although I have been around him many times before. I look down on my iPhone and press the ‘record’ button.

YVAN RODIC ON FACEHUNTER & YVANRODIC.COM
– Face Hunter is a very specific project that is really about a niche topic – that is the style of sort of specific people. Yvan Rodic, the blog, is more the updated version of my interest in life, because it is more meant to capture all kinds of things that might stimulate my mind. So, ehrm, thats the blogs… so I think that if you try to differentiate, when you spend so much time doing a project like that, there are no proper weekends or holidays or things that you reach a point where you are in a blurry zone between who you are supposed to be for real and that sort of online persona, the character.

YVAN RODIC ON INTIMACY
 – I mean, it’s almost instead of having a blog about their life, they (bloggers) try to have a life that is good enough to be blogged about. That’s something you can observe sometimes. It is not always. Intimacy has changed. Before, a diary would be personal, and now intimacy is public intimacy… where people sort of prefer, I mean, it’s like somehow the whole world is more intimate than yourself. (Before) people would be ashamed… I mean before social networks like Myspace and Facebook. This kind of website changed the standard. Where it would become normal or cool to write a personal message to another person but with the possibility to show it to everyone. So thats kind of the big transformation of our society; The concept of intimacy and privacy. And I guess blogging is accompanying this big change. So it’s this sort of  strange mix between intimacy and public sharing. I mean it is very intimate, but in a way in which they want to share it with the whole world. So it’s not that someone is trying hard to promote themselves. I think we just went through a major cultural transformation about intimacy and things.

YVAN RODIC ON IDENTITY
– It’s a game between who you are, who you want to be, who you want to show that you are. So of course, you de facto have to become the editor-in-chief of the magazine of your life. You kind of half decide, what you want to show of your life. You decide, do I want to show all kinds of things?