As his film Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is released, Anton Corbijn considers the contribution his own photographic adventures in the music business have made to rock n roll history.
He has directed five feature films, dozens of pop videos and photographed everyone from Nelson Mandela to Dutch royalty and nude supermodels. But Anton Corbijn’s career is grounded in music photography, which allowed him to escape the Netherlands, where he was the son of the village’s Dutch Reform Church minister.
“At the time, my vision of everything was so narrow-minded. All I wanted to do was take photographs and be successful. I lived in a squat in London. I lived in a brothel in Holland. It was not easy because I was making very hard, black and white pictures just when all this colourful stuff came up with Bowie and all that.” Of course, he went on to photograph Bowie on multiple occasions – in black and white.
His first album cover
“It was fun. It was an American saxophone player called Charlie Mariano and he played with a band that I liked in Holland called Supersister. I did some live pictures, only half a film or something. Then a few months later, they asked me to blow up one of his images and make that the record cover. I still had to use my parents’ house for it and use their bath to wash the print. Funnily enough, Supersister still exist, and I used one of their songs in my first movie, Control. In my first three movies, I used a Dutch rock song in every film to thank these Dutch musicians for saving my life.”
His Joy Division photos
Among the most enduring of Corbijn’s early images was of Joy Division in London in November 1979. He finally got it published six months later, after the suicide of the band’s singer Ian Curtis. That he was the only one facing the camera, over his shoulder, made it poignant after the fact and it became the cover of the New Musical Express. “It wasn’t published until after Ian died when everybody saw that as a premonition.”
Freshly arrived in London from Holland, with shaky English in a hard-to-navigate city, Corbijn bailed up the band backstage at a gig where they were supporting the Buzzcocks. “It was much easier in those days, and they were not a massive band – they were just loved by the NME. And I said that I was an important photographer in Holland. And they reluctantly agreed for the next day.
“I asked them to come to the underground station that was closest to my flat – Lancaster Gate station. I wanted to take a picture that was like a trip into Unknown Pleasures [the title of Joy Division’s debut album]. So, they walked away from me and one of them looked back. I wanted to use their bodies to simulate the feel of the music and that was unheard of in London at the time. It was a European approach.
“But they were the only people who actually loved those pictures. They used it for a record called Licht und Blindheit and then they asked me to come to Manchester to do more pictures. So that was my relationship with them. My English was so bad I never had a proper conversation with Ian Curtis.”
The austere images helped get Corbijn a job at NME. In 2007, Corbijn made his acclaimed feature debut with Control, based on the biography Touching from a Distance by Curtis’s widow, Deborah.
His work with U2 and Depeche Mode
Corbijn shot the photos for U2′s era-defining albums The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, among other work for the band. Since the mid 1980s, he has been the chief photographer, video maker and stage designer for Depeche Mode, the English synthesiser pop band which somehow evolved and endured as a stadium act.
“I was the main photographer at the NME for five years and, in 1982, they said, ‘Do you want to go to New Orleans for this band U2?’ Yeah, I’ve never been to New Orleans. I didn’t care about U2 and same with Depeche. I wasn’t eager to work with them and funnily enough, these two bands define me in a way.”
He sees parallels in the relationships with the bands that English art design group Hipgnosis had with Pink Floyd in their heyday. Having photographed the ruins of Moydrum Castle in County Westmeath, Ireland, for 1984′s The Unforgettable Fire, a few years later he was scouting the deserts of California, partly inspired by cult musician Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet, who lived at Joshua Tree, east of Los Angeles, and the mythology surrounding the death of singer Gram Parsons at the desert town.
The biblical reference of the tree’s name clicked with Bono. Having convinced the band to head to Death Valley, Corbijn hired a Russian panoramic camera, which he had never used before. “I couldn’t be so precise with the shooting – in some of the pictures, my camera case was in it and the horizon was all kinds of shapes. But it worked and imperfection is such a beautiful thing.”
A few years later, Achtung Baby’s garish collage was a visual reaction to the brooding desert scapes. “Achtung Baby had to also show the change musically and I think visually. They needed to go away from the black and white to that extreme colour.”
Starting in Berlin, where the album was recorded, they also shot in Morocco, Tenerife and Ireland. “And every time I would get blown-up pictures and would say, ‘This could be a great cover’, but Bono would always say no. He had in his mind to do some sort of checkerboard of images and it worked really well. I was against it, initially – like the typical photographer, he wants his image big.”
When U2 brought The Joshua Tree retrospective tour – where his photos of the band in Death Valley were projected on a huge backdrop screen – to New Zealand in 2019, Corbijn came along for the ride. “I thought this was never going to happen again.”
Though it has, kind of, as the band’s current residency is at the Las Vegas Sphere, just over the hill from Death Valley. The venue puts 20,000 punters beneath a wrap-around dome screen. Corbijn had been asked to work on visuals for some songs. “But I didn’t actually have the time and then I couldn’t get my head around how it would work.”
When the Listener talks to Corbijn, he’s a few days away from heading to Vegas to see the show. Presumably his name will be on the door? “It had better be,” he laughs.
To read about Squaring the Circle, see here.
