The Frightening Familiarity of Late-Nineties Office Photos

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In the winter of 1999, an odd little movie named “Office Space” gleefully demolished the conventional portrayal of white-collar work. The film, directed by Mike Judge, was set in a fictional software company called Initech; many scenes played out under fluorescent lights in a featureless warren of cubicles. “Mike was always very clear that he wanted it to look realistic,” Tim Suhrstedt, the film’s cinematographer, recalled in a 2019 interview. “He wanted the place to be sort of ‘gray on gray’ and feel almost surreally boring.” Ron Livingston, the movie’s lead actor, remembers Judge walking through the set right before filming, pulling down any detail—plants, photos—that added splashes of color or personality. “Office Space” suffocates its characters in drabness; it’s office as purgatory. The film was part of a broader aesthetic movement that portrayed modern workspaces with an antagonistic suspicion. It came out a month before “The Matrix” and a year and a half before the British version of “The Office.”

Around the same time that Judge was making his movie, the Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk was documenting remarkably dreary corporate spaces in New York, Tokyo, and Stockholm. His iconic collection “Office,” first published in 2001 and elegantly reissued by Loose Joints this month, shares many elements of the “Office Space” style. The lighting is stark and the color palette is dominated by grays and off-whites. In some photos, Tunbjörk creates a sense of claustrophobia, as when a low-angle shot captures a man bounding down an office corridor. The ceiling seems to loom mere inches above his head. In another photo, Tunbjörk portrays stark isolation: a woman stands alone on an empty floor, the lines of filing cabinets and overhead lights converging to a distant vanishing point. The emergence of this aesthetic at the turn of the millennium was not arbitrary. At the time, our relationship to office work began changing rapidly, and it hasn’t stopped since. “Office” may look like a quintessential artifact of its period, but it also manages to feel contemporary, because it captures a mood that still infuses our professional lives.

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