The big picture: a lost office world of endless paper and big cigars

The Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk spent five years in the late 1990s touring city offices in New York, Tokyo and Stockholm and documenting what he found there. This picture was taken in a Manhattan legal office in 1997; it would be safe to say it was not paper-free. Though Tunbjörk might not quite have known it at the time, he captured in those pictures enclosed, climate-controlled worlds in mortal jeopardy. New York’s 2002 Smoke Free Air Act, for example, confined to history small men wandering the office with cigars between their teeth; women in pearls surrounded by legal proofs under office tables also became a rarer sight in the new millennium.

Tunbjörk, who died in 2015, did not stage his pictures. He became a modern master of the padded cubicle and the strip light and the ergonomic swivel chair. When his book of office pictures was first published in 2001 in a limited edition, it quickly sold out. A new version, with a second related volume of LA offices from later years is now being published. They might have come with quotes from anthropologist David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, or perhaps better from Joshua Ferris’s pitch-perfect novel of cubicle life Then We Came to the End: “We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”

The technology helps to date each of the pictures precisely. Computer monitors were about the size and weight of microwave ovens and they are stacked on cheap desks while their human users wrestle with interfaces and listen to the barks and whistles of dial-up internet connections. Wires proliferate and refuse to be tamed. No one is looking at a phone screen. Office furniture did not yet encompass the modular sofa, cleverly designed to fill gaps left by redundant colleagues.