Photographer Focus #12: Lars Tunbjörk

My quest through deadpan photography and New Topographics has led me to discovering a photographer that kind of lives at the intersection: Lars Tunbjörk. I’ve spent a worrying fraction of my life inside offices. When you work as a university researcher or as a software developer, that’s pretty much all you know. Fluorescent tubes, carpet tiles, the smell of someone else’s lunch reheated in a shared microwave (ewww! I remember particularly nasty fishy leftovers). You rarely photograph your own office: you complain about it, pin things to the partition, count the meetings that could have been emails (hint: that’s most of them). The room becomes the background and nobody cares about the background. It’s just where you happen to be, which is probably why so few serious photographers ever bothered with it. Either I’m an exception, or I’m not a serious photographer (the jury is out on that one). I have taken photos of all my offices over time, sometimes because something was happening (e.g.…