HOME
Lars Tunbjork
Lars Tunbjork: HOME. Gottingen: Steidl/Hasselblad Center, 2003. First edition. Square quarto. Pink cloth stamped in black, with plate tipped in debossed front cover, no dust jacket as issued. 106 pp. 49 color illustrations. Bibliography and exhibition history. A fine copy.
11.5 x 11 hardcover book with 106 pages and 49 color plates expertly separated and printed at the Steidl headquarters in Gottingen. Introductory text by Goran Odbratt. Elegant design by Greger Ulf Nilson. Published on the occasion of the 2002 exhibition Lars Tunbjork Home/Office at the Hasselblad Center, Sweden. Final volume of a trilogy with two previous titles Country Beside Itself (1993) and Office (2002).
HOME may be a portrait of a uniformed modern residential nightmare, but in its silence, the repressed personality of place humorously yet quietly resonates from the book's spreads. In these manufactured and manicured suburban landscapes, a sense of loss lingers in the atmosphere and although there is no threat, the nightmare of the suburban abyss is unavoidably evident.
"An emptiness permeates our cities, smaller towns, and moves along the roads. It did not use to be there. When it began to emerge, it went undetected for some time, suppressed beneath a kind of dizzy tipsiness that spread across the country and was everywhere, and which perhaps transformed the very fundamentals of that country. That is why I dread those houses, that sit on the outskirts of any medium sized town, and were constructed in a period of weeks early in the decade." — Goran Greider, on Lars Tunbjork's photographs
"Lars Tunbjork returns to the city, the area, the house, and the rooms where he grew up. This homecoming is not unarmed. Nobody could see this reality with the naked eye only. Through the camera, he turns our attention to matters overlooked. To the bypassed. Thus, he watches over a place that he's still belonging to. And the place responds." — Goran Odbratt, from his introduction