Lars Tunbjörk, Office, 12: Lawyerʼs office, New York 1997 Global labour conditions have steadily deteriorated since the Covid-19 pandemic. While the concept of home office was introduced as an urgent alternative to collective office spaces, its insidious effects were revealed, especially in relation to women's position in the workforce, with piling up of work on both professional and domestic ends and the erosion of domestic space. The shift marked a new moment in the capital accumulation with the fusion of production and social reproduction that reshaped the aesthetic of labour as well.
However bleak the present-day reality, workers in previous decades wrestled with their own oppressive working conditions, albeit within a somewhat different aesthetic frameworks. A brilliant documentarian of this reality was legendary Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, whose iconic 2001 photobook Office has been recently republished by Loose Joints. The republishing also includes LA Office, an unpublished series that the artist completed shortly before he passed away in 2015.
Tunbjörk's Office is a potent reminder of what came before and what continues to persist in different shapes worldwide. Through his keen eye for detail and ability to reveal unexpected moments, Tunbjörk masterfully captured the tedium of office culture and its corporate structure that define our reality.
Office spaces around the world provided Tunbjörk with a wealth of inspiration, from the corporate environments of New York to the workspaces of Tokyo, Stockholm and Los Angeles. While beauty, politics, or even a shock effect are some of the modalities through which contemporary photography works, Tunbjörk decided to turn his attention to spaces overlooked by the public yet central to everyday life that decisively shape one's aesthetic experience of the mundane.
Office reveals these spaces–considered "the most common – but closed and secretive – place in the Western world," by Tunbjörk–in their absurdity, where PCs, rolls of papers, furniture, and other office paraphernalia are their main protagonists, with humans appearing sporadically, as unwilling masters of this gray, bureaucratic realm.
One can't help but wonder: what jobs are performed in these spaces? "Bullshit jobs," as David Graeber explains in his essay of the same title, originally published in Strike! Magazine in 2015 and later reprinted in LA Office.
"Huge 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. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it."
The gray and off-white offices captured by Tunbjörk seem to almost perfectly complement the profound feelings of loneliness and spiritual deprivation described by Graeber. Although the conditions of labor have changed significantly in recent years, Tunbjörk's Office remains strikingly contemporary. Beyond revealing insights into a particular period, it also announced the uncomfortable realities of the emerging digital age.
Designer, art director, and Tunbjörk's close collaborator, Greger Ulf Nilsson, has reworked his original 2001 design for the Office, showing a new perspective on the material, including the LA Office as well. The books were published in collaboration with the Lars Tunbjörk Foundation.
