Anton Corbijn: “This isn’t nostalgia”

Dutch photographer and film director Anton Corbijn didn’t set out to become one of the most influential photographers of all time. He just wanted to get closer to music. “I wasn’t interested in celebrity,” he tells me. We are speaking in Stockholm the day after the opening of his new survey exhibition, ‘Corbijn, Anton’, at Fotografiska. “I was trying to understand what music gave me: that feeling of belonging to another world.”

Over five decades, Corbijn photographed some of the most iconic musicians and bands in history, from Joy Division and Depeche Mode to U2, Nirvana and Nick Cave. His images do more than just document; they create an atmosphere around his subjects. He defined how music in the ‘80s and ‘90s looked and felt. Corbijn’s breakthrough came in 1979 with a black-and-white grainy shot of Joy Division, published in NME, where the band is pictured walking down an empty London Underground tube tunnel, their backs turned as they wear long, dark coats, only Ian Curtis has his shoulder facing the lens. The photograph doesn’t feel staged, and its quiet restraint has a sense of disconnection to it.

That intimacy wasn’t manufactured. Corbijn toured with bands, made videos and shot album covers, before eventually becoming Depeche Mode’s creative director, not just photographing them, but building their visual identity. “It was a creative conversation,” he says. “It still is.” The result is an artist fully in command of the frame, but still open to getting lost inside it. Some portraits are haunting: Damien Hirst appears almost skeletal, with heavy black eye makeup hollowing out his gaze. Others are abstract and dreamlike: in one image, Sinead O’Connor’s face is blurred almost beyond recognition, while the landscape behind her is pulled into sharp focus, reflective of her shyness off-stage. But in every image, Corbijn reveals something deeply human, and a side of the artist you somehow always sensed was there.

Music provided Corbijn with a sense of escapism growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “I was the son of a minister in a small village. For me, the land across the water –  metaphorically and physically – was like a promised land, where music lived, and where life was freer and more liberal. When I eventually got a camera, I photographed musicians. Later in life, I went back to the village and thought, ‘Why did I do all this?’ I realised I’d created this mythology around the liberal world of music –  a contrast to the strict, religious upbringing I had.” Returning to the Dutch village where he was raised, he staged uncanny self-portraits dressed as his musical heroes, including Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley, and Curtis. “It was like my idols returning home.” The costumes were all handmade, and all the photographs are surreal, shot in familiar, provincial locations and framed next to photographs Corbijn has taken of the real figure. “People asked if I was mocking them,” he says. “But no. These people were everything to me. It was serious. I was asking: what if I were them?” The photographs were later shown in the village, and at one exhibition, a guest pointed at the Bob Marley portrait and said, “I didn’t know Marley came here.” Corbijn just laughed. “I was clear about the concept. But people still rewrote it into their own myth.”

Now, at Fotografiska, Corbijn’s retrospective celebrates 50 years of his work, bringing together hundreds of images –  from iconic photographs to experimental self-portraits, surreal colour studies and film — the survey show highlights a mind that’s constantly reframing the world. Starting with his breakout series from the late ’70s and ’80s titled Famouz, Corbijn catches artists off-guard in their portraits, where their performative personas fade and something more vulnerable slips out. Siouxsie Sioux is photographed from behind, her bare back exposed and her silhouette frozen as she tips her black-rimmed hat mid-nod. David Bowie is photographed suited, aviators on, cigarette lit. Nick Cave has lips slightly parted, frowning sideways. “They weren’t posed,” Corbijn says. “It was about being there when something real appeared.” The ’80s were arguably Corbijn’s most defining decade. Moving to London, he embedded himself in the post-punk and new wave scenes, creating a visual language for bands that didn’t fit into the mainstream. His black-and-white aesthetic was raw, moody, romantic yet alienated, and became synonymous with a generation figuring itself out through eyeliner, synths, and industrial melancholy.

In his paparazzi series, Corbijn took a sharp left turn. “It was a theatrical take on paparazzi photography,” he says. “I staged playful scenes but with a fake sense of urgency and mystery.” The prints, developed in a cool bluish tone, feel like stills from a noir film rather than tabloid shots. The idea stemmed from people constantly telling him he was “capturing the essence” of famous figures. “I got bored with that,” he laughs. “I wanted to distort it, reframe it and make it stranger.” The resulting images look like paparazzi snapshots at first glance, but something’s off: that’s the intention. In one photo, Kylie Minogue stands in a sheer top, caught looking out from a bedroom window. She’s mid-phone call and her eyes are distant. “I wanted them to feel like fragments of a film you haven’t seen,” he says. Corbijn’s artistic language and experiments never stay in one lane. In the next room, the LICHT series are blown-out colour, flashlight experiments, creating strange shadows that feel like a visual rendering of the synths pulsing in the background.

‘Corbijn, Anton’ doesn’t feel like a retrospective in the traditional sense. Set in Fotografiska, a former customs house perched on Stockholm’s archipelago waterfront, the space holds sentimental weight for him too. “Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi and I once came to Fotografiska for a show. We respected each other’s work,” he reflects. The opening night drew a crowd of over 2,000: musicians, artists, old friends, new fans, celebrating Corbijn alongside Fotografiska’s 15th anniversary in Stockholm and their new Emerging Artists programme. Upstairs, Fotografiska Stockholm’s zero-waste, vegetable-centred restaurant serves delicious experimental food that is almost in tune with the experimental nature of the art exhibitions the venue holds. Before the opening, we ate roasted onion slow-baked in compost, with mushrooms and crispy artichoke, 3D printed meat, and rhubarb with a sourdough foam.

The survey show is a remix; it doesn’t have a sense of finality to it. Corbijn turns 70 this year, but ‘Corbijn, Anton’ doesn’t read like a legacy. It’s full of questions still being asked. “This isn’t nostalgia,” he says. “It’s a reflection. I’m still trying to make sense of what I saw, what I felt. And maybe help others feel it too.”