Loose Joints republishes Lars Tunbjörk's Office and LA Office in 2024, returning to a body of work from the early 2000s that documented corporate office culture with the cold eye of someone who had been watching it carefully and did not like what he saw.
Tunbjörk spent years photographing the office as an environment, moving through New York, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Los Angeles with the patience of a natural historian cataloguing a species in its habitat. The resulting images are funny and unsettling in roughly equal measure — the drop ceilings, the partition systems, the fluorescent light that flattened everything into the same tonal register regardless of geography, the small personal objects placed on desks as proof of individual existence within systems designed to produce uniformity. There is even a Swedish expression honouring his ironic eye: 'Tunbjörkare' describes a place with specific and somewhat odd qualities.
What Tunbjörk found consistent across these cities was not the architecture, which varied considerably, but the attitude the architecture produced: a particular vacancy, a submission to the logic of the open-plan workspace that read the same in Shinjuku as it did in Century City. The camera documents this without editorializing about it, though the framing always makes the editorial position clear. Meals consumed atop notepads substitute for tables. Corporeal presence seems awkward and burdensome. Individuals appear either confined by rigid geometric frameworks or struggling within them.
Loose Joints' republication restores these books to circulation at a moment when the office, as a typology, has become genuinely contested. The pandemic intervened between Tunbjörk's original publication and this reissue, and the images read differently now: as documents of a period when office attendance was assumed rather than negotiated, when the corporate interior was simply where work happened because no one had seriously proposed that it might happen elsewhere.
The work holds. Tunbjörk, who died in 2015, was not making sociology; he was making photographs. The difference is that sociology ages when its conditions change, and photographs of this quality do not.
