How Anton Corbijn\u2019s photographs shaped the history of rock music. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n Anton Corbijn. <\/p>\n (Rune Hellestad \/ Corbis via Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n In the beginning, the rock star was an alluring figure, and a subversive one. Teenagers screamed at him; their parents resented him. No one thought<\/em> about him.<\/p>\n Now rock stars are people (pronouns: any) whose life stories win National Book Awards and Oscars. We look at them differently than we did when the archetype first emerged sometime in the middle of the 20th century; their aspects reward close examination, we\u2019ve decided. Photographers and filmmakers, much more than music critics, have elevated rock musicians to the status of serious cultural figures. Whether or not this was inevitable, it\u2019s worth remembering that it was not always the case.<\/p>\n The Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn has probably done more than anyone\u2014any nonmusician, at least\u2014to effect this transformation. Best known for his pictures of Joy Division, U2, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave, among others, Corbijn stood out from the generation of rock photographers that preceded him in the pages of magazines like Rolling Stone<\/em>, Creem<\/em>, and the New Musical Express<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cAnton is a cross \/ between a Russian \/ spy, a gigolo, a priest \/ and a painter,\u201d Waits writes in some verse contributed to Corbijn, Anton<\/em>, a new book<\/a> that accompanies a career-spanning retrospective last year in Stockholm. \u201cIf he did not \/ have his camera on \/ him, he could take \/ your picture with \/ a cigar box and \/ you would love it.\u201d<\/p>\n The classic Corbijn image is a black-and-white portrait in which the black runs very deep in places, like charcoal, and contrast is operative. Ink costs meant that only the really popular bands had their pictures printed in color in the rock press of old, so Corbijn\u2019s style developed as a kind of DIY gesture in itself: His first great insight, when he was still in his mid-20s, was to recover the expressiveness of black-and-white photography and its possibilities for evocative composition and interpretation where rock was concerned.<\/p>\n This approach was also well-suited to the look of the musicians Corbijn matured alongside and photographed for British outlets starting in the late \u201970s. These were pale men, mostly, who wore dark clothes and called themselves Fad Gadget, Echo and the Bunnymen, Einst\u00fcrzende Neubauten (which means \u201ccollapsing new buildings\u201d). He would do for Depeche Mode what Rembrandt did for the Drapers\u2019 Guild of Amsterdam.<\/p>\n Corbijn\u2019s backgrounds, meanwhile, are usually outdoors\u2014if not city streets (like the cover of Nick Cave\u2019s The Boatman\u2019s Call<\/em><\/a>), then striking, expansive natural landscapes (like U2\u2019s The Joshua Tree<\/em><\/a>). Grain is not unwelcome; nor is the subject being just out of focus. On the right side of one of Corbijn, Anton<\/em>\u2019s spreads, Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor is folded over herself and snarling like a furious, torsoless sprite. On the left side, she\u2019s a blurry, beautiful floating skull.<\/p>\n Corbijn\u2019s rockers aren\u2019t the pinups of wood-paneled basements and teenagers\u2019 bedrooms, in other words. Rarely do they hold their instruments. The actress Samantha Morton calls them \u201cGhosts from the future or the past\u201d and likens them to \u201cdrawing[s] in an ancient cave.\u201d While Corbijin likely engaged most of these subjects in the midst of a PR cycle, his renderings recall the interesting weirdos stumbled upon by mid-century American documentary photographers like Robert Frank. Many look encountered as much as posed, on their way to some mysterious business.<\/p>\n Most of all, though, they look like actors in stills from old film digests like Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em>\u2014memorable characters in movies that never existed, only their soundtracks.<\/p>\n In the case of one musician, though, the movie was<\/em> made, because Corbijn did it himself. Ian Curtis of Joy Division\u2014whose death by suicide in 1980, at age 23, received little notice in the United States at the time\u2014haunts these pages. Indeed, Curtis\u2019s legacy and Corbijn\u2019s career have been joined since the day in November 1979 when the photographer met Joy Division at a London tube station. A well-known frame from that shoot appears in this book: Curtis stands slightly apart from his bandmates at the top of a staircase, half-turned toward Corbijn while the rest of them face away.<\/p>\n Joy Division\u2019s influence on other musicians and on Corbijn\u2019s own aesthetic can be seen in later photos, like an afterimage. Even before Curtis died, Corbijn\u2019s pictures, along with the inspired graphic design of Peter Saville<\/a>, helped establish the band\u2019s mystique. In another contribution to this book, the U2 bassist Adam Clayton recalls the appeal of Corbijn\u2019s \u201cearly images of Joy Division, who were from the provinces, alienated misfits in their neo-European uniforms.\u201d Clayton\u2019s band was not the only young group to seek out Corbijn at least in part because they hoped to look as serious as Joy Division had\u2014to absorb some of that paint left in Corbijn\u2019s brush.<\/p>\n \u201cswipe left below to view more authors\u201d<\/span>Swipe \u2192<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1980, Corbijn photographed Curtis sitting alone on a smoke break. He looks exhausted, like a man at the end of a long workday. It is one of the very few pictures in the book that seems truly candid, and Corbijn\u2019s reminiscences of this period suggest why. His English was still so poor that he could hardly have directed Joy Division even if he\u2019d wanted to. \u201cI couldn\u2019t understand what they were saying, couldn\u2019t express myself,\u201d Corbijn later admitted. \u201cI never had a real conversation with Ian Curtis.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet Curtis stayed with him. In 1988, Corbijn\u2014now in demand as a director of music videos\u2014returned to his images of Joy Division for the rerelease of their 1980 single \u201cAtmosphere.\u201d In the video<\/a>, figures cloaked in black and white robes, like monks, carry massive enlargements of Corbijn\u2019s pictures through the desert. The effect is bizarre and poignant, the filmmaker appropriating his old photos as religious icons.<\/p>\n Corbijn would go on to make dozens more videos for Nirvana, Coldplay, Metallica, and others, but with \u201cAtmosphere\u201d he demonstrated, as no one before him had done quite so explicitly, that the rock photographer could be more than a documentarian, just as the studio producer was more than a technician. Corbijn was Joy Division\u2019s collaborator. Photography, filmmaking, and music don\u2019t just complement each other, he knew, but compound one another to make something greater than the sum of their parts. Myth, in this case.<\/p>\n The last image of Curtis in Corbijn, Anton<\/em> is actually of Sam Reilly, the actor who played him in the biopic called Control<\/em><\/a> that Corbijn made in 2007. In \u201cAtmosphere,\u201d Corbijn revisited his Joy Division photos in the shadow of Curtis\u2019s death, while Control<\/em> allowed him to step inside those images, as it were, and move around again in Curtis\u2019s life. It also gave him the chance to do what his English couldn\u2019t in 1979: talk to Joy Division, direct them.<\/p>\n The result this time was more uncanny, almost like the \u201cgenerative fill\u201d function of AI that expands the borders of still images beyond their original dimensions. Control<\/em> is more tasteful and informed than that; the director had firsthand knowledge of the material he was reanimating. Something was lost, though, in the mastery that Corbijn now wielded over his subjects. The pictures in 1979 were a collaboration between a photographer and a band set at some distance from each other by language\u2014the sublime product of mutual incomprehension. Control<\/em> was all Corbijn, which meant that it was beautifully shot, in black-and-white (\u201cbecause that\u2019s how I remember that time\u201d), and punishingly serious.<\/p>\n Many fans welcomed Control<\/em> as a sober corrective to 24 Hour Party People<\/em><\/a>, Michael Winterbottom\u2019s earlier film that treats Curtis\u2019s death within a comedy about the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson (played by another Corbijn portrait subject, Steve Coogan). Winterbottom\u2019s depiction is reverent\u2014it even incorporates the \u201cAtmosphere\u201d video\u2014but the lens of Control<\/em> is fixed on Curtis\u2019s pain. (Corbijn\u2019s version of Wilson has negative charisma, as if levity were an anachronism or an intrusion to be cropped out.)<\/p>\n As a service to its subject\u2019s memory, Control<\/em> was an act of what the Catholic Church calls \u201csupererogation\u201d\u2014beyond what is necessary. Fans, critics, and Corbijn himself were pleased with it, but a line in this book sounds like self-incrimination: \u201cLooking back at my body of work from the \u201970s and \u201980s,\u201d he says, \u201cI feel that it could not be bettered, by me in any case.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018, a set of old snapshots showing an office Christmas party surfaced on a Manchester-area Facebook group. They were taken at the Macclesfield Manpower Services Committee, a civil-service agency to assist people with disabilities in finding employment. Ian Curtis is in them\u2014this was his day job\u2014grinning and making merry with affectionate colleagues who look straight from 1970s central casting, no less cinematic than the cast of Control<\/em>. It isn\u2019t just Curtis\u2019s suicide that makes these photos so touching, but their contrast with nearly every other extant image of him, including Corbijn\u2019s. They are glimpses of a man unencumbered by his illness or his legacy.<\/p>\n It is a strange irony of Corbijn\u2019s relationship with Curtis that, having applied such vision to commemorating this man who suffered and dignifying his pain, Corbijn inadvertently gave so much meaning to a few snapshots of Curtis taken in a moment he was happy.<\/p>\n One of Corbijn\u2019s criteria for a worthy portrait is that it has to be different from anything that already exists. He will follow this standard to high drama and occasionally, at the same time, to whimsy, presenting his subjects as familiar strangers. (Corbijn does<\/em> have a sense of humor: In a group portrait here of the Rolling Stones, they wear tall, crooked stovepipes borrowed from The Cat in the Hat<\/em>, like Whoville\u2019s Newest Hitmakers.)<\/p>\n A second criterion is that the portrait must say something about its subject. For the viewer, the achievement of this is instant, a vibe: History, memory, and the viewer\u2019s own experience with the subject\u2019s work are all involved. Corbijn\u2019s genius for collaboration lies here. The original Kodak slogan was \u201cYou Press the Button, We Do the Rest.\u201d Corbijn does a lot more than press the button, but John Lydon, Tina Turner, Kris Kristofferson\u2014they\u2019ve done plenty too, and we see (and hear) it in their faces.<\/p>\n Finally, Corbijn believes a good portrait must say something about Anton Corbijn. Reviewing this half-century of photographs, you understand the qualities of light and dark that appeal to him. You also see an artist who has always known that rock stars are so much more than idols. They endure like movie characters, and they die just like us.<\/p>\n From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Unlike other publications that parrot the views of authoritarians, billionaires, and corporations, <\/span>The Nation <\/span><\/i>publishes stories that hold the powerful to account and center the communities too often denied a voice in the national media\u2014stories like the one you\u2019ve just read.<\/span><\/p>\n Each day, our journalism cuts through lies and distortions, contextualizes the developments reshaping politics around the globe, and advances progressive ideas that oxygenate our movements and instigate change in the halls of power.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This independent journalism is only possible with the support of our readers. If you want to see more urgent coverage like this, please donate to <\/span>The Nation<\/span><\/i> today.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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