Anton Corbijn is bowing out of professional photography
A master of slow photography no longer finds it worthwhile doing it his way
By N.S. | BERLIN
PHOTOGRAPHY as a slow, analogue art-form is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute—that’s six billion each month—and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital products anyone can be a Photoshop hack, selfie whore or filter junkie. We see with our smartphones, not our eyes. What need do we have for old-fashioned specialists using toxic chemicals to make a physical print that can be neither insta-shared nor “liked”?
A case is point in Anton Corbijn, the Dutch artist who in a 40-year career has shot thousands of celebrities, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Björk, and whose iconic album-cover shots include U2’s “Joshua Tree” and Morrissey’s “Viva Hate”. A retrospective of his work at the C/O Berlin gallery feels like a fond farewell to his big-buck career: from now on photography will only be Mr Corbijn's hobby.
The two-floor exhibition features 600 prints from 1972 to 2012, including his famed music photography from the 1990s. A travelling show from The Hague Museum of Photography, Mr Corbijn’s work represents a bygone era of analogue masterworks. Each of the prints on the wall was first seen by Mr Corbijn only as he dipped them into chemical baths in a dark room—as different as possible from the modern digital shoot, where hundreds of shots can be compared and even retouched on the spot with the band and creative director peering over the photographer's shoulder.
Known for melancholic, black-and-white photos with a raw, anti-glamour aesthetic, Mr Corbijn’s work feels timeless. Some images intentionally include motion-blur, like his portrait (above) of Luciano Pavarotti, growling like a death metal star in Turin back in 1996. Even though Mr Corbijn has steady hands, something he credits to his non-coffee, non-smoking lifestyle, he believes sharpness is overrated. It remains the photographer’s technical preference to shoot slow shutter speeds, which allows movement in the frame.
He discovered photography aged 17, trying those steady hands at shooting a live band in Groningen. Having found his passion, Mr Corbijn moved to London in 1979, where he became the chief music photographer at NME. He met and shot thousands of musicians, but stuck with U2 and Depeche Mode, becoming creative director for both bands—a job he retains. Even here times have changed, though. He had three days with U2 to shoot “Joshua Tree” in 1987; nowadays he only has a few hours. “People are busy," he says. "They have lives.”
The exhibition came about last year while Mr Corbijn was directing and shooting his latest film, “Life,” based around Hollywood star James Dean’s friendship with Life magazine photographer Dennis Stock. (The film was met with lukewarm reviews–critics said Mr Corbijn was better at shooting the actors than peeling back their characters' layers.) By day, he would work on the film, by night he would creep into his Berlin office and sift through thousands of contact sheets. It took him six months to lay out the exhibition into two series (named after his most recent books). “1-2-3-4,” is his ode to music photography; “Holland’s Deep” contains his self-portraits, staged paparazzi shots and portraits of visual artists he admires, from Ai Weiwei to Damien Hirst.
The crowd-pleasers are there, including the early shots of a young, innocent-looking Bono, a seriously handsome Nick Cave or Nirvana standing topless. More unexpected are the portraits of German artists in the show: the Slits front-woman Ari Up nude alongside punk queen Nina Hagen dressed like a witch, or painter Gerhard Richter with his back to the camera.
Mr Corbijn has never been into red carpet photography or true paparazzi work; his portraits are considered and painterly rather than urgent. Today's young photographers find selling polished close-ups the easiest route into the business. But it was his artful compositions the subjects of his work seemed to fit into. In 2004, for example, he shot Tom Waits waving a toy gun in Santa Rosa—one of the rare colour photos in the show.
Mr Corbijn has built a career of shooting the music industry’s most successful men. (Sadly where women do appear in this show, they’re often naked, with a strong portrait of Marlene Dumas, a South African painter, being a welcome exception.) But the exclusive access that was once a hallmark of great entertainment journalism is now a carefully coordinated, PR-controlled package, with public figures demanding more control over how they are presented.
There was something sad about perusing the show with Mr Corbijn, who shrugged nonchalantly through his exhibition as something he will never relive again. He has no Facebook fanpage and barely tends an Instagram account with 26 images. Time is still valuable to the photographer, who took days to make his best shots, and spent decades with U2 and Depeche Mode. But now he wants to spend it doing other things. Will anyone who visits the show take the time to appreciate it with their eyes, and not their camera phones? Photography as a slow pursuit is being lost, and Mr Corbijn is unwilling to spend his time to speed it up to today's pace.
