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.
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.”