Lars Tunbjork - Office / Kontor - 2001

First edition, first printing. Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 2, page 318/319. 802 photo books from the M.+M. Auer collection, page 766. Hardback with full beige cloth and photograph mounted on. 275 x 288 mm (10 3/4 x 11 1/4 in), 114 pages. 79 colour photographs. Edited by Gösta Flemming; design by Greger Ulf Nilson; layout by Greger Ulf Nilson and Lars Tunbjörk.

Office / Kontor is an iconic photobook by legendary Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, originally published in 2001, which offers a biting, surreal, and tragicomic critique of corporate office culture. Shot over a five-year period in Stockholm, New York, and Tokyo, Tunbjörk approached these highly restricted workspaces "like an alien," capturing what he described as "the most common – but closed and secretive – place in the Western world."A highly praised expanded reissue titled Office / LA Office includes a previously unpublished second volume exploring corporate environments in Los Angeles.

The book's visual palette is heavily dominated by sickly fluorescent lighting, icy blues, and unappealing shades of corporate grey. This is broken up by jarring, saturated pops of color that emphasize the synthetic nature of the environment.

Tunbjörk documents the "soul-sapping" boredom and isolation of modern "bullshit jobs". Workers appear trapped, physically confined by rigid cubicle dividers, or swallowed by the geometry of open-plan layouts. Rather than grand corporate imagery, the lens points at trivial, chaotic details: a spaghetti-like mass of tangled wires under a desk, sad office carpets, filing cabinets, a solitary pallid birthday cake, and employees eating lunch off a notepad at their desk. In Sweden, the term "Tunbjörkare" was coined to describe his specific style—capturing places that are simultaneously funny, absurd, deeply unsettling, and saturated with a distinct sense of modern melancholy.