Country Beside Itself: Photography and Politics in Late 20 th -Century Sweden Moa Goysdotter Throughout the history of photography, photographers have been concerned with social issues. This is true not only of photojournalists and documentary photographers, but of art photographers as well. One, perhaps obvious, explanation for this is the specific connection to a material reality that is inherent in the photography medium, rendering it favorable, or even natural, for many art photo- graphers to work with social reality. In the text below, I will touch upon the relation between Swe- dish photography and politics throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. However, my emphasis will be on Lars Tunbjörk’s (1956–2015) photography book Country Beside Itself, published in 1993, and more specifically on how the book reflects Swedish society at a socio-political breaking point that would set the tone for Sweden's subsequent social development. Country Beside Itself is consi- dered by many to be the most important portrayal of Swedish society ever made through photo- graphy. In the current essay I explore the explanation of its success. Fig. 1: Skara sommarland 1991 & Fig. 2: Hallandsåsen 1991 (Images are unavailable in this version due to copyright issues) Country Beside Itself contains eighty-one photographs by the internationally renowned Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk. The photographs portray a variety of locations in Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In addition to those images, the book also contains two textual entries: ”Matter,” written by the Swedish author and poet Thomas Tidholm (b. 1943), and ”Good Is He Who Tastes Good,” by the Swedish public debater Göran Greider (b. 1959). Tidholm’s poetic text is constructed around the concept of ”materiality” and is a commentary on the increasing social and cultural focus on the material that Tunbjörk’s images may be said to depict. Greider’s text is inten- ded to show how Tunbjörk’s photographs illustrate and document the political changes occurring in Sweden at the time of the book’s publication in 1993. Both texts can be seen as problematizing the concept of emptiness in an increasingly material culture. The images in Country Beside Itself show people who seemingly have been placed into their sur- roundings. Those surroundings are often full of artificiality and consumerism, or of withered plastic objects once set there to amuse: a large plastic dinosaur or a giant Kalles Kaviar tube (see fig. 1).