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The photographer Lars Tunbjörk died this week, confirming his relatives. He was 59 years old. Sweden has lost one of its finest photographers. Malena Rydell writes about his frozen everyday moments.
The photographer Lars Tunbjörk died this week, confirming his relatives. He was 59 years old. Sweden has lost one of its finest photographers. Malena Rydell writes about his frozen everyday moments.
There are only a couple of hours since I last thought about Lars Tunbjörk. I went through a dark corridor on the way to a waiting room. Then it happened as so often happens, that consciousness shutter freezes a Lars Tunbjörk box. It can be a trash placed in a certain way or a chair that looks abandoned out, it could be anyone’s stance. It is as if his way to make slice of reality is like a filter somewhere in the subconscious.
For more than twenty years ago, Lars Tunbjörk his breakthrough with “Country Beside Itself “. It was when Sweden went through a major crisis. That the country’s small towns began to be surrounded by colored köplador and theme parks was a fairly new phenomenon. It was still a long way to concepts of life and light and fresh, and other words that came into the language when it came time to clean up aesthetically by the eager commercialism first depredations.
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Year 1997. Photographer Lars Tunbjörk
But then, in the early 90s, it was like in the morning light after the party, when the confetti is scattered across the asphalt. Bert Karlsson sat in parliament and Lars Tunbjörk went to his summer land and photographed with sad eyes and warm humor. In “Country Beside Itself” No pictures of the publicly funded joint Sweden, as documentary photographers hitherto happily resided in. None recreation centers, hospitals or streets, barely even a square, it is a portrait of all the rest. They were a time when Sweden was changed so that it actually synthesis, and not just as a unblessed sense of nostalgic souls. But it was only when Lars Tunbjörk told in their own way about all these new public spheres that people really saw it. On the Stockholm Public Library says “Country Beside Itself” is not even on photography book shelf – but on “Geography”.
I remember just how thrilled I was when I saw the whole suite the first time, it was at a gallery in Lund when I read the first semester at the university and went about in a single relieved exhale to have left the small town where I grew up. It was 1995 and I was still tonårigt angry at everything that was restricted in Swedish towns and thought I must kick all that far behind me.
But when I saw Lars Tunbjörk images of ghostly lawns and drooping shoulders, I saw neither contempt or anger without any deep down loved the godforsaken provincial town. I did not understand what they meant, those who said Lars Tunbjörk images were full of class contempt. I saw humor and a photographer who was deeply fascinated by people’s loneliness and longing for meaning and I went almost straight to a photography school and sought out.
Before Tunbjörk no one was photographed as in Sweden. Many photographers were afraid to exploit people, but dared not really use the artists’ freedom. Lars Tunbjörk, who was a press photographer in his youth, broke free from the old reportage photo-yokes and photographed as an artist. He did not say “this is how Sweden out”. He said that this is how it looks when it is mirrored by me and my sadness. It’s probably just because he is subjective as he has influenced so many people’s way of seeing.
Some might lured into thinking that it is easy to take a tunbjörkbild, but it is not it. It was not for Lars Tunbjörk either. He told me that he sometimes tried and tried with some places where he thought he could take good pictures – that Kiviks market and Hultsfred festival – but went home empty-handed year after year.
Anyone who thinks that the is an imagery that is to burn off a flash when a tourist is losing ice cream has not understood how slowly and sensitively he worked. As he approaches a plantation in a roundabout in Borås it with love. I know no one who managed to be so sentimental and so unsentimental in such a brilliant combination.
When Lars Tunbjörk was finished with köpladorna and campsites for he went on residential streets and looked in wonder at the manicured hedge the habitat in the “Home” . He tiptoed into the open office landscapes in the picture story “The Office,” which is labor-criticism before the work line became an official edict. So he pulsed into the dirty slush and discovered that he did not have to spring and summer sharp and bright light to see. It became “Winter,” a thrilling portrayal of everyday life during the dark months.
Offices “in 1999. Photo: Lars Tunbjörk
All of the overlooked, as most of us did not see. Now we see it. But now we must fend for ourselves, though enriched with everything that Lars Tunbjörk learned how to direct their attention.
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