Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
This is the re-edition of the iconic 2001 book Office along with a new series of images LA Office presented in a separate brochure. This copy came with the limited edition print.
Lars Tunbjörk saw Sweden like no other. His camera eye was sharply revealing and ironic, but not without tenderness. He saw the country from the perspective of the periphery. From Borås, Lars Tunbjörk’s career spanned the world. His way of seeing became so powerful that people talked about a ”Tunbjörker” as if it were its own genre. The images that raised so many questions have been integrated into the collective memory.
In Landet utom sig (Country Beside Itself), Tunbjörk’s breakthrough project, he seeks out people at campsites, shopping centers and department stores to tell the story of the market economy’s sudden arrival in Sweden, a social development that in the 90s was also global. With his medium format camera and homemade flash, he created absurdist images full of both humor and sadness. A ’tunbjörkare’ became a concept, and he wrote himself into the history of photography. This is a new, updated edition of the original book, first published in 1993. In addition to the original photographs and texts, the book includes a new foreword by Lena Kvist and an updated text by Göran Greider.
Lars Tunbjörk, Swedish (1956–2015)
Tunbjörk's work redefined contemporary documentary photography through a lens of surreal, deadpan humor. Born in Borås, he began his career as a photojournalist for local and national newspapers at the young age of 15. While his early work was rooted in the black-and-white traditions of Swedish masters like Christer Strömholm, he achieved international acclaim in the early 1990s after shifting to a vibrant, often harsh color palette inspired by American colorists like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.
His breakthrough series, Landet utom sig (Country Beside Itself), offered a sharp and satirical look at the Swedish welfare state, capturing the absurdities of commercial centers, supermarkets, and tourist sites. This project established his signature aesthetic, characterized by the use of aggressive direct flash and saturated colors that transformed ordinary suburban scenes into uncanny, dreamlike compositions. Tunbjörk had an uncanny ability to find the "hidden sadness" in mundane spaces, which he explored further in his famous series Office, a five-year study of corporate environments in Stockholm, New York, and Tokyo. In these images, human subjects often appear swallowed by a landscape of wires, cubicles, and fluorescent lights, highlighting themes of isolation and alienation.
In his later years, his work took on a more contemplative and melancholic tone, particularly in the series Vinter, which documented the psychological weight of the dark Scandinavian winters and his own personal struggles with depression. Despite the often critical or lonely themes in his work, Tunbjörk was known for a gentle and empathetic perspective, viewing the world as an outsider or "alien" to better reveal the strange beauty of everyday life. He remained highly active until his sudden death in 2015, and his legacy is preserved today through the Lars Tunbjörk Foundation and major collections at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
