For centuries, falcons have been revered in the Middle East for their beauty, fierce demeanor and superb hunting ability. So it is fitting that Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is home to the largest hospital for falcons in the world, where falcons are treated in operating rooms, an ophthalmology department and a pox area. (There is even a large intensive-care unit for the sickest birds.) When Dr. Margit Muller, the hospital’s director, describes a typical day there, it sounds much like a place devoted to the treatment of human patients: conducting rounds, checking up on the administration of medication, surgery. “Falcons are regarded like children in a family,” Muller...

Lars Tunbjörk didn’t have to look very far to find, in the middle of no where in the US, what makes his work so special… Which is the sudden appearance in what seams like a perfectly normal daily life of absurd and comical situations. On his assignment to cover the Iowa Republican’s caucuses, Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjork is following the candidates on their electoral marathon. Mormon Mitt Romney and his wife Ann shaking hands in small town’s gymnasium, devout Rick Santorum praying before a plate of nachos, Rick Perry getting the crowd riled up, and finally Newt Gingrich accompanied by Ellis the Republican Elephant…They are all offering to the photographer’s lens their own version...

As part of the Festival of Photography "Planche(s) contact", the city of Deauville has invited Lars Tunbjörk to take a look at the G8 meeting which happened in may 2011.

While many countries are still reeling from the global financial crisis, China is witnessing a frenzy of consumer spending, encouraged by its government. Having leapfrogged America last year to become the world’s second-biggest consumer of luxury goods — behind Japan — China now has a 200m-strong middle class that is eager to part with its disposable income. The wedding industry is thriving, with couples willing to spend thousands and book their perfect day years in advance. An ever-increasing number of malls and department stores are packed to the rafters with everything from bedding to top-of-the-range white goods. All this is not just good news for China: while its citizens are...

It’s one thing to renovate a house. It’s quite another to turn a cave — or a water tower or a church — into a home. Lars Tunbjork traveled from England to Canada and the United States to Germany to meet these eccentric residents who made their living spaces into exceptional houses. In Kyloe in English Northumberland, a family transformed an 18th-century church. After the space’s desacralization, they now shower in the sacristy and sun-bathe in the old grave yard. The Sleepers bought the Missourian cave in which they live today on eBay, while the Reuss family reside in a house built from recycled materials from Boston’s Big Dig. In Germany, a water tower dating from the early...

Sixty years ago, the village's child prodigy, Ingvar Kamprad, was seventeen years old and sold matches. Contrary to the modest trade as Andersen portrays, this will be the starting point of a fabulous empire. Kampgrad quickly founded his own company selling pens, furniture, socks... He names it Ikea, an acronym of his initials, that of his village and that of his farm. The legend is born. Today, Ikea has 267 stores in 35 countries, with sales figures of 21 Billion euros. The kid selling matches is 83 now, he lives in Switzerland, and enjoys a modest fortune estimated at 33 Billion dollars. The small, cosmopolitan town of Älmhult maintains its quiet life, religiously paced by the...

On the run for 12 years, Rodovan Karadzic lived using the fake identity of Dragan Dabic, natural medicine specialist, when he was arrested in Belgrade on the July 22nd 2008. The former chief of Bosnia's Serbian people is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. At the time of his arrest, Dragan Dabic was quickly becoming somewhat of a celebrity in Belgrade: he had his own column in a national magazine and he was collaborating with a well-known sexologist on a novel form of sperm-rejuvenation therapy. Lars Tunbjork went to Belgrade and photographed those who met with him during these 12 years. From a nationalist bar keeper to followers of alternative medicine,...

Swedish actress Noomi Rapace is Lisbeth Salander, in a screen-adaptation of Steig Larsson’s trilogy, Millenium. In “Men who don’t like women”, readers and spectators meet a young unconventional hacker who has to work with journalist Mikael Blomkvits, during an investigation.

International food prices raised by almost 40 percent in 2008, indicating that the monetary price is finally catching up with the true costs of cheap food : obesity in the U.S., malnutrition in developing countries and environmental degradation everywhere. Portraits of young leaders who are changing the way we eat.

The photographs in the Vinter series deal with the mental state we enter during the dark period of the year. Between 2004 and 2007, Lars Tunbjork travelled around Sweden, trying to capture the mood that the winter months put us in here in northern Europe. The project became a way of doing something creative with the feelings of depression that beset him in the winter season. He shows us snowed-in playgrounds, streets and houses, but the selection of pictures also includes interiors, from cafes, restaurants and shops. We see people in their homes, at work or at parties.This series of photographs has another tone, another colour ranger, another temperament than his previous work, yet we...

Located in the far ends of Sweden, the city of Kiruna came out of the ground to serve the exploitation of the most important iron mine in the world. Authorities had wanted to make it as the spearhead of the Sweden conquest of its territory. Lars Tunbjork draws here the portrait of the inhabitants of a city, which, in summer, never sees the sunset. It’s moreover a portrait of the whole city that Lars Tunbjork makes: but not in a documentary way. Architecture, as well as inhabitants, becomes a character that occupies the frame and strikes a pose for the photographer.

In Sweden, some people are acknowledged as electrosensitive. They accuse electromagnetic waves to be the cause of the itches, migraines or dizziness they suffer, and use different methods to protect themselves. The scientist are divided on the question.

Dubai is certainly one of the best spot in the world for sports : one can choose between a round of golf on a course watered by 2,256 sprinklers, a cricket match played on imported English soil, tennis, field hockey, Formula 1, camel races, or even skiing ! The Emirati billionaires pursue their quest to provide the biggest and best of everything.

Cannes film festival is often remembered with conventionnal pictures : a red carpet, some stars... But Lars Tunbjork is offering here his quirky look on this big mass of the international cinema. Photographs full of micros and video cameras, of personnalities or random people. Stars always on the run, between two flashes. Lars Tunbjork shows us the excess of the most mediatic festival of the world.

Golf comes to the Middle Kingdom, with sometimes curious results. For all intents and purposes, golf in China is just 20 years old. t hasn't evolved. It has arrived full-blown, in its high-end and even slightly decadent form. The first modern course, an Arnold Palmer design, opened in 1984. Another dozen or so were added in the decade following. But in the last 10 years the total has soared to 230, making China second in Asia in terms of golf course acreage (behind Japan), and though there is supposed to be a moratorium on constructing courses, new ones seem to spring up every month.

More than just a serie of portrait of the American novelist Philip Roth, Lars Tunbjork is proposing here a true research work on the writer and his books. Philip Roth is photographed in situation, in spots that, without being in his novels, are as imaginary. it is Philip Roth in Philip Roth's America: a reinvented America.

Offices in New York, Tokyo, Stockholm, are the place of a life that people lose while earning it, they are unbearable. Nightmares made of electric cables, depressing cafeterias, fake spaces, absurd tidy up, they become through the eye of Lars Tunbjork the most radical call for rebellion for a renewed « right to laziness ». This work, which with « Home », constitutes discreetly and without obvious agressivity the most implacable critic of our system, a work extremely political under a perfectly acceptable cover, is only possible with a perfect control of color, which becomes the material of the picture.

Swedish housing plot. An artificial and sterilized empty place which is starting to be disturbing.

I Love Boras is Lars Tunbjörk’s document of an aimless journey around Sweden between 1988 and 1995. Supermarkets, parties, small town streets, amusement parks, gas stations, TV-shows, landscapes, food. During that time Tunbjörk was working on his series "Landet utom sig" (Country Beside Itself), but these images were not used in that series because they didn’t fit, they were too ugly, too beautiful or too silly. Together they show a darker and more hysteric view of modern western society and Sweden during the economic recession of the early nineties.

Lars Tunbjork invites us to the land of great spaces, and of children dreams. The cowboy, mythic character of John Ford’ films, rises to a burlesque existence, by the way of the photographer work. We meet, of course, a John Wayne in cardboard, but also really Far West inhabitants.