shashasha

This 2024 edition revives Lars Tunbjörk's "Office" series, originally published in 2001, and expands it with a new series of photographs entitled "LA Office," made shortly before the artist's death in 2015.

Taken in Stockholm, New York and Tokyo over a period of five years in the late 1990s, Lars Tunbjörk's photographs explore one of the most mundane environments in Western society: the office. He captured the soulless cubicles, the mix of grey, white and beige, the cold glow of overhead lights and cathode ray tube computer monitors, the uniformity of shared workspaces (the offices in Tokyo, New York and Stockholm are virtually indistinguishable), but also the almost surreal strangeness of these places, their seeming incompatibility with the human form.
While people were an integral part of the original series, the newly included (and previously unpublished) "LA Office" is entirely devoid of workers, focusing on empty rooms filled with desks, chairs and cabinets waiting to be used. This 2024 edition of the book - designed by Tunbjörk's longtime collaborator, graphic designer Greger Ulf Nilson - concludes with David Greber's essay on "Bullshit Jobs".

“Tunbjörk’s photos are less about technology replacing workers than about technology oppressing them. In the nineties, an I.T. revolution placed networked computers on the desks of countless knowledge workers. With these networks came e-mail, and with e-mail came a new approach to work centered on ongoing, ad-hoc, back-and-forth interactions that unfolded through sterile digital text. Work as a place where humans gathered to collaborate in physical spaces—to have insights and solve problems together—gave way to a new order in which humans became glorified network routers, shifting and sorting a ceaseless stream of bits.”
― from the New Yorker about Lars Tunbjörk’s "Office"