Anton Corbijn
5/7/202656 min
Robert meets legendary photographer ANTON CORBIJN to discuss his major retrospective opening this weekend in Berlin at Fotografiska museum.
The story of Anton Corbijn begins in the quiet corners of a small Dutch island, where he grew up as the son of a vicar. For a young Corbijn, music was an escape, a passion that consumed him. His camera soon became both a tool and a companion, a way to channel his fascination with music and, perhaps more importantly, a means to navigate his own shyness.
When Corbijn moved to London in 1979, the city was electric with the energy of bands like The Clash, The Jam, and Joy Division. Within ten days of arriving in England, he managed to photograph Joy Division claiming he was on assignment for a major Dutch magazine, even though he hadn’t been officially commissioned.
Now, having celebrated his 70th birthday last year, Corbijn looks back on over five decades of work that spans photography, music videos, and film. Corbijn, Anton celebrates his 50-year career and revisits his extensive body of work. Here, you will encounter nearly 150 pieces: iconic portraits of legends like Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, and Marlene Dumas, as well as German icons Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wim Wenders. His signature black-and-white grainy aesthetic became a defining visual language in his work.
A polymath in photography, music videos, feature films, graphic design, and commercials, Dutchman Anton Corbijn is perhaps best known for immortalizing some of the greatest artists of our time. His iconic portraits of musicians, directors, and artists, such as Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Marlene Dumas among others, are praised for the way they capture the soul and charisma of his subjects.
Effortlessly moving in the early 80s from photography into music videos, Corbijn has since made over 80 promos for people like U2, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Coldplay, and The Killers. He is the Artistic Director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode. For U2 he has done the principal promotion and sleeve photography for four decades.
In 2006 Corbijn started working on his first feature film Control about the life, and death, of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s lead singer. The film won many awards worldwide, including 5 BIFAs and the Camera d’Or Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival 2007. Corbijn has since made The American starring George Clooney (2010), A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John Le Carré and featuring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (2014), and Life, about James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock, which stars Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan (2015).
In 2023, Corbijn released his first feature documentary Squaring The Circle about the iconic album art design studio Hipgnosis. In 2025, he directed his fifth feature film titled Switzerland starring Helen Mirren.
Follow: @AntonCorbijn4Real
Visit the exhibition: @Fotografiska.Berlin
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First 90 secondsRobert Diament· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I am Robert Diament, and you're listening to Talk Art. Welcome to Talk Art. Now, today, I am feeling like I have a vocation because I think I've always had this creative calling and whether it was making music for a long time before I worked in the art world, I never wanted to have a kind of, um, conventional pedestrian life in a way. I think I was always seeking something a bit more exciting. And today's guest, from all the research I've been doing, definitely had this calling as well to do things his own way and he, for a very long time, was quite specific and particular about, uh, the kinds of images he wanted to make. He's a world-renowned photographer. He's also a filmmaker. I mean, there's so many different ways to describe him [laughs] because his creativity has been, um, very expansive. And I know that last year was his, um, 70th birthday, but it was also celebrating 50 years of his contribution to culture, whether that be the kind of, uh, hundreds and hundreds of images that he's taken of incredible musicians and creatives. Um, when I was growing up, I was really inspired by his images of Nirvana and Depeche Mode in particular, but also people like The Killers who were kind of adjacent to when I used to make music, um, and also U2 of course. And recently there's been an incredible book that's been put together with M&M Paris