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
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.
Grain is life, there's all this striving for perfection with digital stuff. Striving is fine, but getting there is not great. I want a sense of the human and that is what breathes life into a picture. For me, imperfection is perfection.
Photography has taken me from isolation.
I have such a love of good music that I find even melancholic music uplifting. Maybe I'm a rare breed.
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.
I feel that when I shoot anything, and I have something beautiful, I just move on.
I am a village boy, and Amsterdam for me was always the big town.