![\"Anton](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/04848f91-e173-490a-a8f2-41ffe639db42.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAnton Corbijn is a master of the moody, revered for his black-and-white photographs of U2, Depeche Mode and Joy Division, and Control, the film (also in black-and-white) that he directed about the last band. He admits to being \u201ca serious NME guy\u201d when he started out in the late Seventies as a photographer for the music weekly, then a bastion of supercilious cool. But Corbijn has a silly side too. He remembers a shoot with U2 on a street in Amsterdam that began dreadfully. \u201cI couldn\u2019t get the vibe going at all so I dropped my trousers,\u201d he says. \u201cThen they were all in stitches and we continued.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s quite the revelation, more Benny Hill than Bauhaus, and underlines an important point about portrait photography: you can have oodles of technical flair but if you\u2019re no good with your subject, it\u2019s irrelevant. Corbijn, 70, is blessed with both camera and people skills, although that doesn\u2019t mean he sucks up to those he shoots. They don\u2019t even need to be comfortable, he says, speaking from his studio in Amsterdam. \u201cJust comfortable enough for them to stay. A bit of discomfort is good for the picture. My climb to this position was slow because I don\u2019t make people look beautiful but I hopefully make them look interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Anton Corbijn<\/p>\n
GEORG HOCHMUTH\/APA-PICTUREDESK\/SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n
He really does, from David Bowie in a loincloth to Miles Davis hiding behind his hands. Corbijn shot Bowie backstage when he was appearing in The Elephant Man in Chicago in 1980, having travelled there on spec at his own expense. His parents had given him money to buy a cooker \u201cbut I spent it wisely on a plane ticket and I never regretted it. Bowie was just a gentleman and it\u2019s impossible to make him look bad. A lot of people I photographed 40 or 50 years ago were young \u2014 that works in their favour with my approach. Bono always tells me, \u2018I love your old pictures.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 On tour with David Bowie \u2014 by the hairdresser who saw everything<\/a><\/p>\n Other musicians Corbijn has shot include Kurt Cobain (\u201cthe sweetest guy\u201d), Frank Sinatra (\u201cquite old and forgetful\u201d), the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Sinead O\u2019Connor and Siouxsie Sioux. Many of those pictures feature in his vast, recently published book, Anton Corbijn.<\/p>\n In 1989 Corbijn moved to Los Angeles and began photographing non-musicians: the actors Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood and Cameron Diaz; the writers William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; the artists Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei and Lucian Freud; the supermodels Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. Even Nelson Mandela (\u201cI had a minute, one picture, but it\u2019s a beautiful picture, I think\u201d).<\/p>\n Sometimes subterfuge is required. When he arrived to shoot the Stones armed with a selection of witches\u2019 hats for them to wear, the band were less than keen. \u201cMick [Jagger] said, \u2018I\u2019m not wearing that,\u2019\u201d Corbijn recalls. \u201cI kept pestering him and he went, \u2018Ask Charlie [Watts]. If he wears it, I\u2019ll wear it.\u2019 So I went to Charlie\u2019s room and he looked at what I had in my hands and went, \u2018I\u2019m not wearing that.\u2019 We talked and he said, \u2018Is Mick wearing it?\u2019 I lied and said, \u2018Yeah.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Musicians make great subjects, he says, \u201cbecause they are more in charge of their own destiny\u201d. He cites Johnny Rotten: \u201cGreat choice of clothes, so creative.\u201d With actors \u201cit\u2019s all about looks. One of the reasons I loved Philip Seymour Hoffman was that he had none of that vanity. He\u2019s one of the best who\u2019s ever done it\u201d. Corbijn went on to direct Hoffman in his spy film, A Most Wanted Man. <\/p>\n Nick Cave in London (1997)<\/p>\n ANTON CORBIJN<\/p>\n This week Corbijn is receiving the icon award at the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards. \u201cI\u2019m really happy to get something from England because I feel that in England I don\u2019t really exist,\u201d he says. He is talking about geographical separation as much as anything. Nowadays he divides his time between Amsterdam and Kenya with his wife, Nimi, but London is where he made his name. He moved there in 1979 from the Netherlands, where he had grown up, the son of a pastor, in a conservative community on an island called Hoeksche Waard.<\/p>\n \u201cMusic was a big escape out of the life that I had,\u201d he says. \u201cI had nothing to fall back on so I gave it everything when I was in London. I survived the squats, the bad food and all that.\u201d Six months earlier Neil Spencer, then editor of NME, had told Corbijn that he would give him work if he came to London. \u201cI moved to England, came to the NME and he didn\u2019t know who I was.\u201d Reminded of his promise Spencer took him on a tour of the office (\u201ca mess compared to music magazines in Holland\u201d) and introduced him to the writers, one of whom welcomed him by singing a song whose lyrics included, \u201cI hate the f***ing Dutch. They live in windmills and wear clogs.\u201d <\/p>\n U2 are one of Corbijn\u2019s most enduring collaborations<\/p>\n ANTON CORBIJN<\/p>\n Days after arriving in London Corbijn got in touch with Joy Division and asked if he could photograph them. One of the shots he took in Lancaster Gate Tube station is seminal: while the rest of the overcoated band have their backs to the camera, the singer, Ian Curtis, looks directly at it. Six months later Curtis killed himself. \u201cIt was a way that people didn\u2019t photograph in England, as far as I could tell: using the band to symbolise the music,\u201d Corbijn says. In this case that meant austere, enigmatic and coldly stylish. \u201cI did it for myself and nobody wanted to publish the picture until Ian died.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Joy Division\u2019s Stephen Morris: \u2018Ian\u2019s death still haunts me\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n If Joy Division were the perfect fit for the young, earnest Corbijn, his most enduring collaborations \u2014 with U2 and Depeche Mode \u2014 took longer to come about. With Depeche, he says, \u201cI held back for years. I was not enamoured with their music at the time \u2014 too poppy for me. I was also not interested in U2 but the shoot had to be done in New Orleans. So I said, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll do that\u2019, because I\u2019d never been to New Orleans.\u201d <\/p>\n Depeche Mode in Los Angeles (2016)<\/p>\n ANTON CORBIJN<\/p>\n At the start of his career Corbijn says he was \u201cvery uncomfortable with beauty\u201d but by the time he shot Moss, Campbell and Turlington in the nude he was more at ease. Models are used to beauty and nakedness, I suppose \u2014 you\u2019re not going to get Johnny Rotten to take his clothes off. \u201cNo, nor was I interested in that.\u201d <\/p>\n After directing videos for Nirvana, Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers and many others, Corbijn made another leap \u2014 into films. \u201cI held off for a long time because I was kind of shy,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve overcome that now, but to be at the head of a group of 150 people, that\u2019s not for everybody.\u201d <\/p>\n Yet when Control was suggested \u201cI thought, \u2018Well, if I ever make a movie this is probably the one, because I have this emotional connection with the subject matter.\u2019\u201d It\u2019s a fantastic film \u2014 true to the spirit of Joy Division and predictably gorgeous-looking, with Sam Riley outstanding as Curtis. Peter Hook, the band\u2019s bassist, said he knew it was \u201ca great film\u201d when \u201conly two people went to the toilet\u201d during its premiere at the Cannes film festival in 2007: his fellow band member Bernard Sumner and a 70-year-old woman.<\/p>\n Sam Riley as Ian Curtis in Corbijn\u2019s film Control<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n Corbijn followed Control with The American (2010), a thriller with George Clooney; A Most Wanted Man (2014); and Life (2015), about the friendship between the Life magazine photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and James Dean (Dane DeHaan). All were stylish and praised, if not as enthusiastically as Control had been, but he hasn\u2019t released a feature since. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to make the movies that I make \u2014 between $10 million and $20 million,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to make the ones of $50 million and upwards.\u201d <\/p>\n He has just finished his first film in ten years, though, an adaptation of Switzerland, Joanna Murray-Smith\u2019s sinister play about a young man who travels from New York to Switzerland to persuade Patricia Highsmith to write another instalment of her Tom Ripley series. It won\u2019t be called Switzerland because that makes Corbijn think of \u201ccuckoo clocks or something\u201d, and contrary to reports it won\u2019t be in black and white, as that would make it too similar to Ripley, the 2024 series based on Highsmith\u2019s The Talented Mr Ripley. <\/p>\n![\"Nick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/13975edc-4f6f-4ef3-bdcd-52ee86703de4.jpg\")
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