{"id":8170,"date":"2026-10-12T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=8170"},"modified":"2026-09-30T13:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T11:55:12","slug":"photographer-focus-11-lars-tunbjork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/10\/12\/photographer-focus-11-lars-tunbjork\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Focus #12: Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My quest through deadpan photography<\/a> and New Topographics<\/a> has led me to discovering a photographer that kind of lives at the intersection: Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve spent a worrying fraction of my life inside offices. When you work as a university researcher or as a software developer, that\u2019s pretty much all you know. Fluorescent tubes, carpet tiles, the smell of someone else\u2019s lunch reheated in a shared microwave (ewww! I remember particularly nasty fishy leftovers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You rarely photograph your own office: you complain about it, pin things to the partition, count the meetings that could have been emails (hint: that\u2019s most of them). The room becomes the background and nobody cares about the background. It\u2019s just where you happen to be, which is probably why so few serious photographers ever bothered with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Either I\u2019m an exception, or I\u2019m not a serious photographer (the jury is out on that one). I have taken photos of all my offices over time, sometimes because something was happening (e.g. office move), sometimes for no reason, just because for me it was pretty much home. I used to work until very late and I knew all the night staff and the cleaners by name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Office move, 1999<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk did as well. Hence the affinity I felt with him when I discovered him. For five years, between 1994 and 1999, he went through offices in Stockholm, New York and Tokyo, with the occasional stop in a smaller Swedish city such as Gothenburg. The book that came out of it, titled Office<\/em>, was first published in 2001 by Journal\/Max Str\u00f6m as a limited edition. It sold out quickly and stayed out of print for more than twenty years, an unfortunate fate for one of the best records we have of how work actually looked at the end of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project nearly didn\u2019t happen. In 1997 Tunbj\u00f6rk was on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, sent to photograph offices; the magazine\u2019s photo director, Kathy Ryan, was a close friend. Greger Ulf Nilson, the Swedish designer who worked with him for decades, remembers what actually tipped him in. \u201cHe was on assignment for The New York Times… and he just saw this building with these empty offices\u201d. Tunbj\u00f6rk had spent his working life until then learning to look at unremarkable places, which is what made the empty building something to look into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He picked up a camera as a teenager working for a daily paper in Bor\u00e5s and later travelled the world as a press photographer with Agence VU\u2019, shooting for the New York Times Magazine, Time, GEO and Liberation. In the palette you can feel William Eggleston, who made American colour respectable, and in the deadpan composure something of Christer Str\u00f6mholm, the great Swedish black-and-white photographer; both were early influences on him. Along the way he collected the Swedish Press Photographers Club\u2019s Photographer of the Year award and First Prize at World Press Photo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His breakthrough came in 1993 with Landet utom sig<\/em>, known in English as Country Beside Itself<\/em>, a portrait of Sweden as supermarkets, theme parks and tourist sites that recorded, in the words of his biography at Moderna Museet, \u201cthe last death-throes of the Swedish welfare state\u201d. Sweden didn\u2019t enjoy having that mirror shown to it. \u201cPeople were shocked by Country Beside Itself\u201d, Nilson remembers, \u201cthey thought it was very cynical, \u2018this is not the country that Sweden is\u2019\u201d. Except it was, it wasn\u2019t cruelty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In offices he found the perfect subject for that cold observation. He shot with harsh on-camera flash, which throws a hard little light into every corner and flattens depth, and saturated colour pushed until it\u2019s almost garish. Tim Adams, writing in the Guardian, said: \u201cTunbj\u00f6rk, who died in 2015, did not stage his pictures. He became a modern master of the padded cubicle and the strip light and the ergonomic swivel chair\u201d. The results live somewhere between deadpan documentary and low horror (think backrooms creepypasta). Low angles push the ceilings down until they become a threat. Corridors stretch away without end. The palette is a muted wash of greys and off-whites. It doesn\u2019t show places where anyone would want to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He photographed the office \u201clike an alien\u201d in the soulless, banal uniformity of these workplaces. His camera appears to ask what is going on, what are the rules, what are these places. The images don\u2019t seem to make sense, but you know as the viewer that this is reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Adams picked one picture, a lawyer\u2019s office in New York shot in 1997, as the anchor of his big-picture essay on the republication, and once you\u2019ve seen it you understand why. The published description says it all: small men wandering the office with cigars between their teeth, women in pearls surrounded by legal proofs under the office tables. It clearly wasn\u2019t a paper-free office (TPS reports<\/a> anyone?). It would be impossible today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Office No 12: Lawyer\u2019s office, New York, 1997<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ Agence VU\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The picture freezes the office at the moment of transition, before its contents were replaced by screens and electronic devices. You don\u2019t need to know what the job was. It\u2019s a feeling you recognise if you worked through the 90s, one that Tim Adams put in a phrase: \u201cenclosed, climate-controlled worlds in mortal jeopardy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stockbroker office in Tokyo, photographed in 1999, exists along the same lines. It\u2019s part of the batch of Tokyo pictures that now looks like illustrations for an argument that arrived years after the film was exposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stockbroker, Tokyo, 1999<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ Agence VU\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That argument came from an anthropologist. In his essay Bullshit Jobs<\/em>, David Graeber claimed that \u201c[h]uge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed\u201d. \u201cThe moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation\u201d, he wrote, \u201cis profound\u201d. When Loose Joints reissued Office<\/em> in 2024, they printed Graeber\u2019s essay inside the book, introduced by lines from Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cBallad of a Thin Man\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1999 gave the world Office Space<\/em> and The Matrix<\/em>, both fantasies about how working life this hateful could only end with a printer smashed in a field<\/a> or a red pill swallowed<\/a>. 2001 gave British television The Office<\/em>, a sitcom constructed from the small (and arse clenching) bruising incidents of a paper merchant\u2019s branch. Cal Newport, writing in the New Yorker about the reissue, said the photographs share many elements of the Office Space<\/em> style and should \u201cremind us that it didn\u2019t have to be this way\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Office<\/em> wasn\u2019t the first if its kind, and Nilson is careful to name its rare precursors when he talks about how unusual the project was. \u201cIt\u2019s not very common that photographers go for that boring environment… There is a few, of course \u2013 Anna Fox did a book called Work Stations<\/em>, then there is Lee Friedlander\u2019s At Work<\/em>. But just boring offices, not that many have documented that.\u201d Anna Fox\u2019s Work Stations<\/em> came out of photographing offices around London in the Thatcher years; Lee Friedlander\u2019s At Work<\/em> documented American labour of every kind. Tunbj\u00f6rk narrowed the subject to a single white-collar species and stayed there for five years. Hardly anyone else thought the banal room itself, with no event in it, deserved that kind of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take the car manufacturer\u2019s office in Gothenburg, 1997. Nothing happens in it, which is the point. Tunbj\u00f6rk called the office \u201cthe most common \u2013 but closed and secretive \u2013 place in the western world\u201d. That photograph is completely everyday, white socks and all, but you will never be allowed inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Car manufacturer, Gothenburg, 1997<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ Agence VU\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Tokyo municipal offices push the claustrophobia further. Low angles make the ceiling feel oppressively low, corridors seem to go on past reason, and the people in the middle of it all look less like masters of their environment than part of the furniture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Civic administration, Tokyo, 1996<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ Agence VU\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Creative Review described the book as \u201cequal parts chaos, claustrophobia, and comedy\u201d. Some of the photos indeed border on comedy. Probably unintentional. For example in the construction company in Tokyo, 1999, workers seem to be doing stretching exercises in a cramped office where files pile up floor to ceiling, and where desks swallow all the available floor space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Construction company, Tokyo, 1999<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ Agence VU\u2019<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The book vanished from the shop shelves for two decades while the culture it documented became the norm, a nightmare, then a memory. The 2024 reissue from Loose Joints, produced with the Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk Foundation, arrived as a two-volume set in a slipcase that Nilson designed to resemble office file storage, reworking his original 2001 design. Its second volume is where the story takes a strange turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s called LA Office<\/em>. Shot in 2004, it consists of just thirteen images of vacant offices in Los Angeles. No workers. Only rooms with chairs and desks, still arranged ready for occupancy, as if the tenants of the previous decade had mysteriously vanished. Office<\/em>\u2019s grey and brown colour schemes and labyrinths of partitioned walls have since given way, Creative Review noted, to \u201cbrighter, more open plan spaces\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tunbj\u00f6rk died suddenly of a heart attack in 2015, at fifty-nine, so he never saw either volume published. He had created more than half a million negatives by then. The retrospective happened without him: in 2018 Fotografiska in Stockholm mounted a survey of his work under the title Tunbj\u00f6rklandet \u2013 blicken fr\u00e5n sidan, and his pictures are in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Maison Europ\u00e9enne de la Photographie in Paris, MoMA in New York, the Hasselblad Center and the Bor\u00e5s Konstmuseum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathy Ryan, the editor who sent him to those first offices, wrote after his death: \u201cThe great thing about being an artist, a writer, a musician, is that you leave something behind. And Lars left something extraordinary behind\u201d. She meant his whole body of work, but Office<\/em> is the part that remains the most relevant, which is probably why Wallpaper, Creative Review, the Guardian and the New Yorker all covered the reissue in late 2024. At the Swedish embassy\u2019s 2023 Washington exhibition, the cultural counsellor Helene Larsson Pousette described the photos as revealing \u201ca deep fascination for people\u2019s loneliness and longing for meaning\u201d, and said many Swedes recognise themselves in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can read Office<\/em> as an indictment, and plenty of people do. Or you can read it as a weird love letter to environments most people hate. Nilson, who knew him better than almost anyone, is unambiguous: \u201cHe was absurd, but never cynical. He was very much in love with the people that he took photographs of. Of course, critical as well, but not cynical, which is a big difference\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I might be over-reading it, but that distinction, critical but not cynical, is really what the whole project is about. Tunbj\u00f6rk was interested in the people and how they fit in their environment. No matter what their office looks like, they\u2019re still people, sometimes crushed by their environment as in the Tokyo construction company photograph. Cynicism would have flattened the people into furniture. Tunbj\u00f6rk didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The empty rooms of LA Office<\/em> make the same point from another point of view. A room full of desks and chairs, all in their places, with nobody expected to arrive. Photographed in 2004, it looks now more as a preview of something Tunbj\u00f6rk couldn\u2019t have seen coming: the office kept warm and staffed by no one, the worker relocated to another place we don\u2019t see. Some argue about how much these pictures predicted the empty offices of the 2020s. The difference between a room waiting for people and a room that people have left is small in photographs and gigantic in life, and we all lived that life in the last few years. As in deadpan photography<\/a>, interpretation is left to the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LA Office (unpublished series, 2004)<\/em> \u00b7 \u00a9 Lars Tunbj\u00f6rk \/ courtesy Loose Joints<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I left offices a good while back. I\u2019ve been working from home for the last 16 years, and I don\u2019t plan to return to one full time (there isn\u2019t one near my anyway). When I look at Tunbj\u00f6rk\u2019s pictures now I feel no nostalgia and no smugness. It\u2019s more something like to recognition: someone bothered to look properly at the room I spent years in, and refused to dehumanise the people living in them. The office was going to disappear in its current form, and he caught it right at the edge, at full brightness, with the flash on. Kathy Ryan was right that he left something behind. His gift were pictures of the most common room in the world, taken by someone who loved the people inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n