A Morning with Corbijn
April 29th 2009 – Ludwig Museum
He’s photographed some of the world’s biggest stars, directed some of its most iconic music videos, helped shape an aesthetic of an era and directed a multi-award-winning film. Anton Corbijn doesn’t aim to stop there, though, it seems. His retrospective exhibition entitled Work is currently on display at the Ludwig Museum, and spans thirty years of the Dutch photographer’s work: from his early video clips to recent portraits. Gábor Fabriciusz, Creative Director of Republic of Art, led a live discussion with Anton Corbijn at the Ludwig – and of course we couldn’t resist going along to see what the black and white heavyweight had to say about celebrity, artistic inspiration, cycling in the Hague and loneliness.
Your photographic work features some of music, film, art, literature and politics’ most famous faces. What role do you think celebrity plays in your work?
I guess some of the people I’ve photographed are or have become celebrities, yes. It was the work that brought me to the people, though, not their celebrity. I’m not interested in personalities because they’re famous – a lot of people are famous for not doing anything and I’m not interested in them.
What does fame mean to you?
I’m not sure I really deal with fame. There are famous people in my photos, but I don’t want my work to be bent on who features in it. At the same time, though, there is of course that attraction to who’s in the photograph. Many of my photos, though, are of people who weren’t famous at the time they were taken. Some people have become well-known since.
You say fame means nothing to you, yet 90 percent of your images are of famous people. What’s your attitude towards approaching icons?
I think it goes back to things I was originally attracted to when I was young. I grew up in a very isolated place, and the only things interesting to me were those which came from far away. The Beatles visited Holland and one guy from my village went; it all seemed so exciting. There was an attraction for me to wanting to know more about that world and in the end wanting to be part of that world. In a sense it was a “magic world” outside of my family. Nobody there spoke about celebrities, which I suppose was linked to the time – it was the 50s and 60s, and people viewed celebrities in a different way to how they do today. I grew up in a very different world to the one I’m in now. I was raised in a very protestant family, which meant a world with very little visual stimulation of any kind.
Can you tell us about your relationship with God?
That’s a topic that at this time in the morning I’d like to skip! I grew up with the idea that there was a heaven and a hell, and as a kid you really visualize that. You form pictures in your head. At this point in my life, my Protestant upbringing definitely has an influence upon my work, regarding my work ethic for example. I feel your work has to have some value; you need to make something that has a purpose – obviously you can define purpose in different ways. It doesn’t make sense to me to photograph someone the same way somebody else has. I choose different ways and hopefully ways which mean people can find something within my images.
Can you speak a little more about your Protestant background in particular and the predominance of a focus upon man in his environment in your work?
I don’t direct my subjects too much, so the way they appear in their environments is not always a deliberate thing. People are small in my early photographs, but I don’t think they’re quite as iconic as some people say they are. Holland is a very monotonous landscape, and much of my early work was taken there – which obviously affected the result.
Aside Protestantism, for me there’s romanticism in your work. I see a big heart behind the big, hard black and white images. Do you see yourself as a romantic person?
Absolutely. This exhibition is about a little boy going out into the world with a camera.
And did you find what you were looking for?
Yes. I told some guys actually and they made a song about it… In many ways I found more than I could have imagined. Seeing this exhibition makes me realise a few things, as I don’t often see my work together. Funnily enough, I don’t have my own images at home. Every picture is a journey; I’m not a studio photographer, so people come to me and I travel a lot for work, alone. There’s a beauty to that, really.
On the subject of loneliness, your photographs have a sort of loneliness in them. Are you lonely? How is loneliness a part of your life?
My work is solitary and sometimes lonely, yes. I mainly travel alone – travelling with a whole group of people, it became a bit like a circus. I find it far better to travel to a subject alone, as you get a different reaction. I think that makes my pictures different to other peoples’.
Have you made one particularly memorable journey?
I travelled into the desert for the cover image of U2’s The Joshua Tree. I spent days looking for suitable locations, then the band flew in for the shoot. Although I chose locations beforehand, we mainly improvised. Some of my most interesting journeys have been when I’ve asked to take photos of someone myself.
What’s your motivation behind your work. I mean, why do you work at all?
It’s partly due to the Protestant work ethic I grew up with, I suppose.
You’ve recently moved into film. Which directors or films do you particularly admire or have you been inspired by?
I’m a novice in the film world. I’ve seen very few films in my life, actually. I was inspired by the early westerns I saw as a kid, as well as the work of Swede, Ingmar Bergman – works like The Seventh Seal. I suppose I see a northern European way of looking at things in his work, and that’s something I’m interested in. His work is really beautiful, and his images aren’t necessarily leading up to the next ones, which is something I like.
In work like your first film, Control (2007), there’s often an atmosphere lacking in joy in your work. Where does this come from?
As a kid I was prone to depression and I was very shy. Yes, there’s quite a dark approach in my work. I choose to focus upon the more painful moments in the creative process of subjects, rather than the ‘orgasm’ on stage, as I call it, where there is a big public focus on things. The predominance of black and white in my work is also linked to practicality. In the beginning, I couldn’t develop color myself, so it’s how I started working. Afterwards, I was able to move away from it, but I deliberately stayed with black and white. To me, the roughness, the boldness is ideal – it gives you a certain closeness to a person. Also, by not setting shots up too much I think you can capture the fragility of life more fully. It becomes less artificial. I felt that I had less emotion when working with set up, bright colors.
I wouldn’t say my work lacks joy, though. It’s not all serious. The Star Trek images, for example, are more playful than some of my older black and white work. Also, The Blue Series is playful. There’s fun in there. There’s also humor in works like the Danny DeVito portrait. That also brings us to the great thing about photographing celebrities. Everyone knows DeVito’s a small man, so the balloons pulling him up make the image funny. With the self-portrait series, however serious the thoughts behind them might be, I think they make funny images. Seeing Bob Marley in my little village – I think that’s quite funny.
How did film directing compare with photography?
With film, you need to work in a very different way to photography. Afterwards, it was really brilliant to go back to photography. It felt so beautifully simple – it’s a much nicer life. You need to spend much longer setting images up for film… photography’s far more immediate. I really like to see what I can do with or for a film, though.
What was your reaction to working with other creative people to produce Control?
When you’re working on something like that, you’re putting your own creativity onto other creative people. Obviously, the visual side of the film was something close to my own heart, but you select a director of photography based upon their qualifications. You have to accept their ideas – the best ones get used, and there’s no ego battling.
Your work isn’t always easy for a cultural consumer to digest. It was originally intended to be ‘alternative’, so how does it feel that this alternative art is now popular? When did you feel you’d lost control and the media started eating up your work?
Well, I hope I’ve never lost control. In the 70s and 80s, my work was a reaction to the public vs. personal issue – very much a reaction against mass images. I think The Joshua Tree was when I sensed a real change, though. Photos I’d always produced and seen alone in my darkroom at night had become massive billboards. I began to feel more removed; my images had become the mass images I was reacting against. By the late 80s, I was a very confused person.
I suppose that brings us to the media attention that’s now upon you. How are you affected by it, and do you feel in control of your fame?
To be honest, I do more of these kind of things that I’d like to. I prefer the focus to be upon my work rather than me, but interviews are a way to push a project. I think I’m in control of my fame, yes. I don’t feel affected by it in any huge way – tomorrow I’ll be back in the Hague, cycling to the bakers!
You’ve mentioned European art. Do you consider yourself to be a European artist. What does that mean to you?
I think European art demands more active participation from an audience than American art, for example. The meaning is left more open. In America, the approach is a response to the fact that many people like to know what they’re looking at. My work is less clear.
So, would you call it a democratic process?
I think that’s a dangerous word. I think it’s a slightly more organic process. I’m happy for people to interpret my work in any way they want. I don’t want to explain how every photograph was made – I think that takes something away from the work. To speak about inspiration, turning to your music videos, what’s the relationship between the music and the images. Did you listen to the music before creating a concept, and how related are the two? For you, how is the creative process influenced?
For me, there are two approaches. Obviously you have to listen to the music for a video first. If the music doesn’t inspire you, you shouldn’t make a video for it. For some, like Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, I began with an idea. I had to go back to the band three times with the king concept; once I have an idea it’s impossible to come up with anything else. I sold it to them as a ‘cheap’ video, and it became the most successful video for them ever. There I was inspired by the lyrics, too. There’s no lip-sync in the video, apart from during the line, “words are very unnecessary”. For this, I was inspired by the lyrics as well as the emptiness of the title Enjoy the Silence. That’s how I usually work with videos.
With The Killers video (All These Things That I’ve Done), there’s a high piano note at the start – like drops of water into a pond. From that, I had the idea of a person falling into a pond, and that became what the video was about. I had no idea what the song was about, and the band said later on MTV that they had no idea what the video was about either. Sometimes videos and lyrics go together better than I thought they would. In my older videos in particular, though, I made no direct connection to the lyrics, as I think that makes a video boring.
The only video I made according to other people’s ideas was Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box. Kurt Cobain made very detailed drawings, and in the end 80-90 percent of the video was made up of his ideas. I have to say, I think that’s one of my most successful videos. Curt faxed his ideas over, I really wanted to make a video with him anyway and that’s how it came about. His concept was based upon The Wizard of Oz, and his ideas were very realistic. For example, he wanted real butterflies. I made fake ones, though – something like that really changes things.
Who are your most recent subjects?
I’ve been moving into photographing artists: Lucien Freud, Anselm Keifer, Peter Doig, Don van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) and Marlene Dumas are the most recent.
And what projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently designing a building in Amsterdam. It’s a studio for working, not living, with a big, high ceiling. It may seem surprising, but it’s like making the Depeche Mode stages. I come up with the ideas and craftsmen make my drawings happen.
What importance do buildings hold for you?
They’re a very important part of our lives. It’s a real challenge to design a building, especially one with a location like mine. It’s in an industrial part of town, near the harbor. There are lots of square buildings there and I want to do something that isn’t square. I lived for 29 years in England, where I saw an old fashioned sense of architecture – the old buildings keep workers smaller, with small windows letting in very little light. Buildings are so related to society, and being an architect is an incredible responsibility.
How do you view the relationship between your work and advertising?
I don’t see any real relationship between the two. I’ve only done a few adverts – I’ve regretted some, others I’m happy with. Album sleeves are obviously advertising, but I don’t see them that way. I did a Levis campaign in Sweden, it was great. I did one in Germany, it was horrible. BMW were brilliant, they gave me a free rein.
And what does the future hold?
I’m currently working on a new film. It’s a fictional thriller based in Italy; it’s in pre-production now. It’s in color and it’s contemporary – so it’s far removed from Control. After my first film, I received pigeon holed offers – the life of John Lennon etc., but I really wanted to work with a different genre… and I like thrillers. It does have one comparison with Control, though: it’s also about a loner. They attract me.
Anton Corbijn: Work can be seen at the Ludwig Museum until July 5th. Control will be screened numerous times during the exhibition, see www.lumu.hu for further details. There’s also a competition running alongside the exhibition, inviting entrants to produce an alternative video for Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. The deadline is June 14th. See www.corbijnbudapest.hu for details (Hungarian). The exhibition is part of the Dutch Festival ‘Nincs Lehetetlen – Holland Kultfeszt’.
For further information, see www.nlfesztival.hu.
Transcript by Amy Weston
Dates: Through July 5th
Ludwig Museum, Palace of Arts
1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell utca 1.
Tel.: +36.1.555.3300
www.lumu.hu
www.corbijnbudapest.hu
www.nlfesztival.hu
www.corbijn.co.uk