A picture of a snowman made of the dirtiest snow, a black smile spray-painted across its face, is positioned on the wall next to a window overlooking the snow-covered lawn of the American Swedish Institute.
See works of the Swedish photographer who inspired cinematographers of the TV show ‘Severance’
Selections from two of Lars Tunbjörk’s famous series “Winter” and “Office” are part of the exhibition at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
January 27, 2025 at 12:00PM
This frosty season is uncomfortable, but there’s also something disturbingly satirical about the placement of the photo.
The snowman picture by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk is from his 2007 series “Winter.” If this picture doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve likely seen images from his 2001 “Office” series, an eerie, satirical portrayal of ‘90s office life that inspired cinematographers of the hit TV series “Severance.” The colors feel over-the-top, almost too bright to feel real, offering a pop sensibility mixed with the absurdity that is everyday life.
These are just two of the four series included in “Lars Tunbjörk – A View From the Side,” a traveling pop-up exhibition curated by the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, D.C., and the Lars Tunbjörk Foundation. Tunbjörk, a member of Agence Vu who worked for the New York Times Magazine, Time and others, is an internationally known photographer. He died suddenly in 2015, but his images live on.
“What he’s capturing in his ‘Office’ series, and in a lot of his photography, are these kind of mundane, everyday scenes but with a different lens, with a little bit of irony and humor in them,” said American Swedish Institute Exhibition Manager Erin Stromgren.
The exhibition also includes selections from two of his other well known bodies of work: his breakout series “Landet utom sig/Country Beside Itself,” 1993, a commentary on the decline of Sweden with an emphasis on leisure and commercialization, and “Home,” 2003, centered around his childhood neighborhood and similar suburbs of Sweden.
But it’s his “Office” series, documenting the alienating nature of work, that caught the eyes of the “Severance” cinematographers.
“His ‘Office’ pictures are not Edward Hopper’s ‘Office at Night’ over at the Walker,” said University of Minnesota Associate Professor Robert Silberman, who teaches film studies and the history of photography. “Computer cables and carrels and that sort of antiseptic gray and gunmetal colors, and then people underneath the tables are showing their feet, shoes off. So it’s sort of split between a certain kind of desolation and comedy.”
Winter, summer
Two German shepherds sit on guard in front of a yellow and red house that’s covered in snow. The sky is deeply blue against a thick blanket of massive fluffy white chunks that keep falling. In another picture, a woman of color pushes an older white woman in a wheelchair along a snowy trail, calling to mind Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill.
These are Tunbjörk’s takes on winter, a series he shot between 2004-2007 in Scandinavia. The project began as an assignment in 2004 for the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, and along the way he confronted his own seasonal affective disorder and winter-induced depression.
On the other side of the room, his breakout series “Landet utom sig/Country Beside Itself,“ 1993, includes pictures of the warmer months in suburban Sweden. But everything feels intensely bizarre. A shirtless, very suntanned middle-aged man riding a white go-kart down a black asphalt track speeds past a skinny Santa Claus. In another picture, two people recline on lawn chairs under yellow umbrellas, but it’s too cloudy to sunbathe. A man in shorts pokes his head into a larger-than-life tube of caviar.
Is this Sweden or is it some alternate commercial world? Tunbjörk’s heightened use of vivid color mixes summer joy with absurdism.
“That’s where the color works on the night and the snow,” Silberman said. “It’s wonderful, it’s potentially dark and headed towards David Lynch world, and like some of the other works, it’s potentially kind of just comic and odd. Like some of the ‘Office’ pictures or the go-kart picture, there’s things in there that move toward Monty Python or a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”
‘Lars Tunbjörk – A View From the Side’
When: Ends Feb. 9
Where: American Swedish Institute, 2600 Park Av. S., Mpls.
Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue., Wed., Fri.-Sun.; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thu.
Cost: $8-$20, free for kids under 5.
Info: 612-871-4907 or asimn.org.
Whether it’s authentic is being determined and will take time
