The terrifying familiarity of office photos from the late 1990s

In the winter of 1999, a strange movie called “Office Space” gleefully shattered the conventional image of white-collar work. Directed by Mike Judge, the film takes place at a fictional software company called Initech; many scenes take place under fluorescent lighting in a featureless maze of cubicles. “Mike always made it clear that he wanted the movie to look realistic,” recalled Tim Suhrstedt, the film’s cinematographer, in a 2019 interview. “He wanted the place to be kind of gray on gray and feel surreally dull.” Ron Livingston, the film’s lead actor, remembers Judge walking around the set just before filming began and removing any details – plants, photos – that added splashes of color or personality. “Office Space” smothers the characters in grey; this office is like purgatory. The film was part of a broader aesthetic movement that presented modern workspaces with antagonistic suspicion. It was released 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 film, Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk was documenting the incredibly bleak corporate spaces of New York, Tokyo and Stockholm. His iconic ‘Office’ collection, first published in 2001 and elegantly reissued this month by Loose Joints, features many elements of the ‘Office Space’ style. The lighting is harsh and the color palette is dominated by grays and off-whites. Tunbjörk creates a sense of claustrophobia in some of his photos, as when a low-angle shot shows a man hurrying down an office corridor. The ceiling seems to hang several inches above his head. In another photo, Tunbjörk shows complete isolation: a woman stands alone on a bare floor, while a row of filing cabinets and ceiling lights converge to a distant vanishing point. The emergence of this aesthetic at the turn of the millennium was not accidental. During this time, our attitude towards office work began to change rapidly and has not stopped since. “The Office” may look like a typical artifact of its era, but at the same time it feels contemporary because it captures the mood that still accompanies our professional lives.