Photophnompenh Festival Lars TUNBJORK comes from the world of press photography (he first worked in black and white for a Swedish daily newspaper). Over the years, he then became one of the greatest contemporary colorists – in a more and more radical process of elimination of anecdotes. He is also one of those who succeeded in avoiding ’trends’, to invent a writing that belongs only to him. First, with crushing humor, he painted, without any malice, the foibles of his contemporaries, by inventing absurd situations and functioning, especially around consumption. He had a crazy vision which, through a mass of improbabilities and stupidity, became as comical as it was depressing. He continued in the same vein but with fewer and fewer anecdotic components, to explore the office world where, even empty, the functional spaces and the shades of the fitted carpet were becoming disturbing and poisonous. As well as the homes where the middle classes display their conception of comfort, their taste, their cheap dreams, more despairing and pathetic than ridiculous. From works to works, whether he devotes himself to his native city or he describes his deep perception of winter, Lars Tunbjörk offers us a point of view, a way to see the world without any indulgence but without judgment, with a seeming detachment that allows to deeply criticize without dramatizing. And this is his deep knowledge of color as the true material of his images which allows such perception, which is never caricatured and is, finally, generous. Christian Caujolle