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
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.
I have such a love of good music that I find even melancholic music uplifting. Maybe I'm a rare breed.
I don’t crop my images and I always shoot handheld. By doing that I build in a kind of imperfection and this helps to emphasize reality.
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've gotten used to not looking too far into the future; it's best when you can begin each day anew.
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.
Photography has taken me from isolation.
By self-analysis you can not change your character, but you may change your mentality.
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.
I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.
Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.
My world is much bigger than music, and that's why I always fight the 'rock' label.
I happen to take photographs, and they happen to be used for a lot of things, but they're not really made to order. They're paid for, but they're not made for order. I've never really done real commercial work.
For me N.M.E. was a very big thing. When I first came to the United Kingdom I started taking pictures for them and I became their main photographer for five years, and that's really been the basis of everything I've been doing since.