Anton Corbijn On 50 Years Of Capturing Icons, Making Movies, And Never Losing The Spark

“I went to a photography school one day a week, but it was just hopeless. They put you off photography, if anything,” says one of today’s most influential music and portrait photographers, sitting across from me in a dimly lit speakeasy, closed specifically for our interview. Anton Corbijn arrived in Reykjavík late this afternoon and wanted to do all his press in one day, hence his 20:00 cappuccino. He’s in town just for a few days to receive the Reykjavík International Film Festival Award for Creative Excellence. The artist behind many of the most famous musician portraits in his signature high-contrast black and white — from Joy Division, Nirvana, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave, to his close collaborators U2 and Depeche Mode — admits he’s basically self-taught. “I tried to go to art college, and they wouldn’t have me. I tried three different ones in Holland,” he says. He spent a year taking a one-day-a-week photography course before dropping out. “Then I left, and started myself — that was just when punk came around, in the 70s.”

Dreams across the water

Coming from a small town in the Netherlands called Strijen, Anton wanted to leave as early as he can remember. The reason wasn’t necessarily the place itself, but the religious environment he grew up in. “My father was a pastor, and most of my family were pastors actually — my grandfather, my uncles. I felt that [was] stifling,” he says. “When I heard music on the radio at friends’ or went to the hairdresser’s and they had pictures of The Beatles, I had the idea that, naively as it may sound, there was another world outside of my island that was really exciting. For myself, I would call it the ‘promised land,’ across the water.”

“I had the idea that, naively as it may sound, there was another world outside of my island that was really exciting. For myself, I would call it the “promised land,” across the water.”

Music quickly became Anton’s obsession, his first true “love.” When his family moved to the mainland, he started visiting record stores, trying to find a way into that world. A few years later, when his family moved again, 17-year-old Anton borrowed his dad’s camera to photograph a band playing in the town square. He took a chance and sent the photos to a local magazine, and they got published. “I thought, that’s it,” he says. “I can become part of that world without having to learn an instrument. I mean, that road took a lot longer than I initially thought, I was still at school, of course. But yeah, that became my direction.”

He first started in live photography, but got quickly frustrated by it — there was so little control over the composition, and so much left to chance. “I started to knock on dressing room doors and ask people if we could take a portrait,” he recalls, “And that worked out.”

London calling

In 1979, Anton moved to London, a burgeoning epicentre of punk and new wave music, where he soon started working for the legendary street magazine NME.

“NME now only exists on the internet, but it was like the Rolling Stone of Europe. It was really the most important music magazine in Western Europe in the 70s and 80s,” Anton says. “It was incredible. It was a weekly, so every week, there was so much to photograph.” Between 1980 and 1985, he was the main photographer for NME. Working with the magazine opened many doors for him, and he met a lot of people he still collaborates with today.

Certainly, one memorable moment was Anton’s first-ever photoshoot with David Bowie, which he more or less crashed.

“I had just moved to England, not even a year before that, and I lived in a squat. Dalston, in Hackney, was a very tough area in 1980,” he recalls. “I’d found a little flat in the housing association, and my parents gave me some money to buy a cooker, but I spent that money on a ticket to Chicago. I knew the writer for NME who was going to go. They had said no photography was allowed. So they went, ‘What are you doing here?’ when I arrived. Well, you know, I showed my portfolio. I left it in the hotel when David stayed in Holland a few years ago, and I got a note back that said it was ‘lovely’ or ‘good’ or whatever. The assistant asked me, ‘What’s your name?’ When she looked it up in a diary, it said, ‘Anton Corbijn, best photographer in Holland.’ She had written down herself,” he says. “Then she told David about it, and it was okay to take some pictures. And these pictures were of him in The Elephant Man costume. It was fantastic to get those. They’re still in my exhibitions.”

It wasn’t the last time he would photograph David. Remembering working with him, Anton says, “He was fun, he was a gentleman, and he was beautiful-looking. So it was very interesting, always. It was a dream.”

As eventful as Anton’s time at NME was, it ended when he was fired — a difficult period that would later turn to be a “saving grace.” He turned to personal projects: in photography, design, and video.

What sets Anton’s work apart is that he rarely works in a studio — he’s a bit of a “nomad” photographer. “I go to where people are. I don’t know where I arrive, or what kind of conditions [will be]. So it’s an adventure, taking a picture in that sense, more than in the studio,” he says. This approach has taken him across the globe — from Kurt Cobain in Seattle, Bono in Tokyo, or Björk in Reykjavík. “I came here to photograph her in 1999, and I photographed her in London already, and in LA. She’s a great subject — she’s original, remarkable. It’s very hard to take a dull picture of Björk,” he smiles.

“It’s very hard to take a dull picture of Björk.”

In 50 years of taking photos, Anton has collected countless stories. Limited by the time, we skim through a few, before I bring up The Killers, the band that introduced me to his work as a teenager.

“The Killers was funny because they kept sending me songs. I’d never heard of The Killers, so I didn’t even listen to the songs,” he recalls. “But the fourth time, my assistant said, ‘you know, they’re number one everywhere.’ I went, ‘Oh, really? Maybe I should listen to them.’ Then I realised they played a few days later in London, so I said, ‘Oh, let me meet them then.’ So I met them, and they thought I came with a whole video script. I went, ‘No, I haven’t heard the song yet. I just wanted to see what you guys are and what you need from me.’ So that started awkward,” he smiles. In the end, he did listen to their songs and made a music video for “All These Things That I’ve Done,” starting a decades-long collaboration with the band.

Moving pictures

Even though Anton directed dozens of music videos beginning in 1982, he never set out to be a film director. “With photography, I have a sense that I know what I can do with my camera,” he admits. “With film, I have no idea.” It took years before he had the courage, and eventually stepped into filmmaking with Control, a 2007 biopic about Joy Division’s frontman.

“When the script came for the Ian Curtis film I thought, ‘Okay, maybe if I make a film, this might be the film,’ because I have an emotional connection to the story,” he shares. Joy Division was among “the main reasons” Anton moved to London in the first place. By another series of coincidences, or perhaps his persistence, within just two weeks of arriving in the UK, he photographed the band at Lancaster Gate. His English at the time was limited, and he didn’t know London, so suggested the closest tube station to his flat for a photoshoot. Back then, no magazine wanted to publish the photo, but after Ian Curtis died by suicide in 1980, it appeared on the cover of NME and became iconic.

Joy Division, London, 1979 © Anton Corbijn

“I wanted to make it a black-and-white film, how I remember the 70s in England,” Anton says of making Control. The feature went on to receive strong critical acclaim, powered in large part by Sam Riley’s portrayal of Ian Curtis — a performance that captured both the singer’s fragility and magnetism. “The English actors I used are really good,” Anton says. “I prefer them over Dutch actors. I would never have made a movie in Holland. The English never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, as they say. They love embellishing a story.”

“After 50 years of hanging around with musicians, there are no secrets.”

During RIFF, the Reykjavík audience had a chance to see Control, as well as Anton’s 2022 documentary Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis, about the design studio behind some of the most iconic album covers of our time. “It’s a fun story. These are the guys who made all the Pink Floyd albums,” he shares. “The stories are just wild — there was so much money around and such crazy ideas. And they just did them all in the 70s.”

His newest movie, Switzerland, a thriller about Patricia Highsmith, which he hoped to finish in time for RIFF, won’t be released until next year.

It must be love

Today, photography is still a big part of Anton’s work, “[You] can’t live off films,” he tells me. But he also keeps busy with other “bits and pieces,” mostly visual projects — from designing album sleeves to creating stage design for Depeche Mode.

I ask if music is still as important to him as it was when he was a teenager. “Not that much,” says Anton. “That was the only thing I lived for — music. My wife, our dog — these things [have] become very important to me now. Life with friends and in the arts — painters, filmmakers — that’s interesting at least as much as musicians.” He pauses, “The thing is that after 50 years of hanging around with musicians, there are no secrets. I know how they record something. I know how they travel. I know how they eat. That’s not exciting anymore for me to discover.”

Yet he admits that music can still move him, and there are still subjects he hasn’t photographed but would love to. “There’s a few that are deceased that would like to [photograph]. I did a book of self-portraits, where I dressed up as musicians who passed away in the village where I was born. There was a connection between the obsession of my parents — life after death — and my own obsession with musicians,” he says. “But like John Lennon, for instance, or Bob Marley. Bob Marley, I photographed live. I did one picture of Bob Dylan, and I think I could do more good ones, probably. There’re quite a few painters that I missed out on.”

The door of the speakeasy opens, and I’m politely reminded it’s time to wrap up. With one last question, I ask if Anton has any advice for photographers and filmmakers just starting out. “I have no idea how to advise anybody,” he says. “The only thing I learned over the years is that if you don’t do what you love, you will fail. You have to really love what you do because you go the extra mile if you love what you do, and that’s what makes you different.” Is this still true for him, after fifty years in the business? Anton nods, “Yes.”