Loose Joints / Lars Tunbjörk Foundation, 2024. Office: Hardcover with tip-on, 120 pp., color illustrated, 295 x 282 mm. LA Office: Stapled debossed brochure with cloth cover, 32 pp., color illustrated, 182 x 282 mm. Photographs by Lars Tunbjörk. Design by Greger Ulf Nilson.
Tunbjörk's iconic 2001 photobook of corporate melancholy is re-published in a luxurious slipcased edition, alongside an exclusive, unreleased series.
Loose Joints is honoured to announce the posthumous re-publication of Office by legendary Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, alongside the release of LA Office – an unpublished series completed shortly before his passing. Tunbjörk's iconic series from the turn of the 21st century delves into the bureaucracy, disorder, and mundanity of office culture with masochistic delight, capturing the soul-sapping environments of corporate spaces with unparalleled insight.
Over five years, Tunbjörk explored offices across Stockholm, New York, and Tokyo, photographing 'like an alien' in the soulless, banal uniformity of these workplaces. He sought to capture that lingering sadness in what he called "the most common – but closed and secretive – place in the Western world." While the winds of change may have transformed the grey dividers into WeWork couches or the clunky dialup PC into a sleek, pocketable touchscreen tablet, Tunbjörk's images capture a contingent sense of ennui and isolation still prescient in an era of bullshit jobs, quiet quitting and working from home.
This two-volume series is redesigned by Tunbjörk's close collaborator, graphic designer and art director Greger Ulf Nilson. Nilson reworks his original 2001 design of Office, presenting a fresh perspective alongside a separate book of unseen works in LA Office, both housed in a slipcase. The book is published in collaboration with Lars Tunbjörk Foundation.
