Anton Corbijn
Anton Corbijn
Anton Johannes Gerrit Corbijn van Willenswaardis a Dutch photographer, music video director, and film director. He is the creative director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode and U2, having handled the principal promotion and sleeve photography for both bands for almost three decades. Some of his works include music videos for Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence", U2's "One", Bryan Adams' "Do I Have to Say the Words? and Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box", as well as the Ian Curtis biographical film...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth20 May 1955
I think Amsterdam is to Holland what New York is to America in a sense. It's a metropolis, so it's representative of Holland, but only a part of it - you know, it's more extreme, there's more happening, it's more liberal and more daring than the countryside in Holland is.
My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.
The only advantage of the CD is that you have a booklet that can tell a bit of a story, but the little covers are just boring. I love vinyl, and I have loads of it. It's the same thing as digital photography versus film photography. It's a quality thing.
You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.
Generally my focus has been on people who make things, whether it's writers or directors or painters or musicians.
In England, I'm already labeled a rock photographer, which is a little insulting, because I'm not a rock photographer at all.
Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.
Photography has taken me from isolation.
My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.
My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.
With photography, you are lucky if you get people to look at your pictures at some point. There's no formal way to show them.
There's a lot about records that you cannot feel from a CD.
My way in for photographing people is really their work. I'm always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that's the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first.
I don't think I treat my film work as an extension of my photography. There are two different sets of rules there.