Lars Tunbjörk

Lars Tunbjörk was born in 1956 in Borås, a small textile manufacturing city in western Sweden, a place whose provincial ordinariness would haunt and inform his work throughout his life. He grew up in a working-class family and came to photography through newspaper journalism, working as a press photographer for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a formative apprenticeship that sharpened his eye for the telling detail, the incongruous juxtaposition, and the strange theatre of everyday life, but Tunbjörk soon found the conventions of news photography too constraining for the kind of seeing he wanted to do.

By the mid-1980s, he had begun to develop the distinctive visual language for which he would become known: direct flash, high-saturation colour, slightly off-kilter framing, and a sensibility that hovered between documentary observation and something closer to deadpan comedy. His flash unit became his signature tool, flattening space and rendering the mundane world of offices, shopping centres, and suburban streets with a harsh, revelatory glare that stripped away any possibility of cosiness or sentimentality. Where other photographers used natural light to create atmosphere, Tunbjörk used flash to destroy it — and in the destruction, something truer was revealed.

His first major book, Country Beside Itself, published in 1993, turned his lens on the Sweden of the early 1990s economic crisis. The images showed a nation unravelling at the edges: deserted town centres, garish commercial displays, people caught in moments of bewilderment or isolation against backgrounds of consumer excess. The book established Tunbjörk as one of the sharpest visual commentators on Scandinavian society and announced a photographer whose work was simultaneously funny and deeply melancholic.

It was Office, published in 2001, that brought Tunbjörk international recognition. The project documented corporate office spaces across Europe, Japan, and the United States, and the images were devastating in their cumulative effect. Conference rooms littered with abandoned coffee cups, cubicles drowning in Post-it notes, fluorescent-lit corridors stretching into nowhere, desks piled with the detritus of meaningless labour — each photograph was both precisely observed and subtly surreal. The flash stripped away any pretence that these environments were designed for human flourishing, revealing them instead as absurd theatre sets for the performance of late capitalism.

Tunbjörk followed Office with Alien in 2008, a project that extended his vision to the broader landscape of globalised consumer culture. Photographing across the United States, Japan, and Europe, he documented shopping malls, hotel lobbies, Christmas displays, and urban streetscapes with the same forensic flash and the same disquieting sense that the normal world was, if you looked closely enough, profoundly strange. The title was apt: Tunbjörk's camera had the quality of an alien intelligence encountering human civilisation for the first time and finding it baffling.

Throughout his career, Tunbjörk was associated with a generation of Scandinavian photographers — including JH Engström and Anders Petersen — who rejected the polished aesthetics of commercial photography in favour of raw, subjective, and emotionally charged work. He was a member of the VU' agency in Paris and exhibited widely in Europe and beyond. His work influenced a younger generation of photographers interested in the intersection of documentary practice and conceptual art, and his images of office life became touchstones for anyone attempting to photograph the absurdity of contemporary work culture.

Tunbjörk struggled with depression and health difficulties throughout the later years of his life. He died in Stockholm in 2015, at the age of fifty-nine. His legacy is that of a photographer who saw clearly and without illusion — who understood that the most revealing photographs of modern life were not to be found in its dramatic moments but in its banal, fluorescent-lit, carefully maintained surfaces, where the cracks, if you looked carefully enough, were always visible.