Circling back: Lars Tunbjörk's uncanny office photography is revisited in a new book

‘DO NOT TURN THIS MACHINE OFF’ warns a yellow label affixed to a computer. The monitor is one of many, seemingly piles and piles, one side of which are potentially dead, with pink post-it notes stamped to their screens, and the other very much alive, all aglow with streaming data. Photographed at a stockbrokers’ office in New York in 1997, at the scene’s centre, a tight corridor of cables gives way to a small American flag, a gentleman in a shirt and tie just visible above.

‘It's not very common that photographers go for that boring environment,’ says Greger Ulf Nilson, reflecting on the wider context of the photograph, the office. ‘There is a few, of course – Anna Fox did a book called Work Stations, then there is Lee Friedlander’s At Work. But just boring offices, not that many have documented that.'

The art director and graphic designer was the long term collaborator of Lars Tunbjörk, the late Swedish photographer who authored the image in the stockbrokers’ office, and numerous others in workplaces across New York, Tokyo and Stockholm, between 1994 and 1999. While Ulf Nilson’s observations of the office as a dull, uniform place are largely ordinary – Fox’s series, shot in offices around London under Thatcher, echoes some of this drab sensibility – Tunbjörk’s work offers a heightened reading of the otherwise familiar; the light feels brighter here and the compositions are somehow more compelling, despite existing just as Tunbjörk found them.

‘It was typical, because Lars really was into the daily life of ordinary people,’ continues Ulf Nilson, recalling the photographer’s preoccupation with how others engaged with their environment, perhaps most vividly showcased in 1993’s Landet Utom Sig: Bilder från Sverige (Country Beside Itself: Pictures from Sweden). ‘People were shocked by Country Beside Itself, they thought it was very cynical, “this is not the country that Sweden is”,’ remembers Ulf Nilson, who first met the photographer in the late 1980s, when Tunbjörk sought his involvement on another project; the pair continued to collaborate closely up until his sudden passing in 2015. ‘He 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.'

First published in 2001 and long since sold out, Office is revisited this month by the publisher Loose Joints, released with a second volume shot in Los Angeles, the previously unpublished LA Office. While people – employees and employers – and the way they inhabit these spaces is a central, captivating thread in Office, the new series, made in 2004 and comprised of just 13 images, is free of workers: here vacant rooms feature just chairs and desks, still arranged ready for occupancy. ‘He was on assignment for The New York Times – Lars was a very good friend of Kathy Ryan, the legendary photo editor – and he just saw this building with these empty offices,’ explains Ulf Nilson. ‘I think they were kept there for future films.’

‘12 years ago we first thought to publish this book, but it didn't work out,’ he continues of the LA story. ‘I have one copy – it was so lousy, the binder destroyed it. I was a little sad about that, because me and Lars, we were very in love with it.’ The reproduction of the wider series became the perfect vehicle for it, and the new edition closes with David Graeber’s 2013 essay, Bullshit Jobs (lyrics from Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ meanwhile, introduce it, a hangover from that first lousy iteration, agreed upon by both men). ‘Me and Lars, we worked so tight together, I didn't want to touch anything as that would be feel very strange. It's a piece of art we made together,’ notes the designer. ‘If we had done the book for the first time today, we might have done it a different way. But as Lars is not with us anymore, I wouldn't dare change anything. The images too, I mean they’re sort of timeless. You can see the different computers, but I think in another 20 years you will see the big change.’

Loose Joints publishes the posthumous re-publication of Office by Lars Tunbjörk, alongside the release of LA Office

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