Speaking to me on the eve of the opening of his retrospective at Fotografiska Berlin, Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn sits face to face with his own legacy; one shaped by the images he has captured of countless musicians and artists in a bid to narrate theirs. Five decades into his career he is no longer a voyeur of greatness, but an architect of its imprint on history. Reflecting on his role as a cultural historian, he states, “I can see that my work is part of the story of other people’s lives. I don’t know if that’s how I saw it at the time [of taking the photographs], but I think I would be disappointed if it wasn’t at this point in my life.”
On display until 20 September 2026, at Fotografiska’s Oranienburger Strasse home, Corbijn, Anton, offers an unprecedented look into his life’s work, and what a life it has been. The comprehensive exhibition is essential viewing for music and film fans, and features nearly 150 pieces that include momentous portraits of pop culture icons Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese and Marlene Dumas, as well as Germany’s homegrown heroes Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wim Wenders.
Corbijn’s dreamy, almost ethereal, black and white photographic style is anchored in a reality that is grounded by the rawness and magnetism of his subjects. Caught in candid moments of playfulness, vulnerability or working motion, his images emerged as an antidote to the pedestal of editorial studio photography, instead offering audiences what feels like a stolen backstage glance at their idols. His commitment to honest, spontaneous documentation has become the foundation of a visual language of fandom trusted by actual fans: a legacy that positions him as a photographer who shoots through a lens of true admiration and intimacy.
The son of a vicar, raised on a small island in the Netherlands, a teenage Corbijn found himself enchanted by the riffs, rhythms and rock and roll of the punk acts of the UK and beyond, moving to London in 1979. Before sitting down to speak to the now 70-year-old photographer, I pondered what we might have in common. Aside from a deep knowledge of northern English music from the late-seventies and eighties, and a penchant for storytelling, how might we relate to each other? As it happens, it turns out that a fanatic love of music is all you need to foster connection. “I was a fan when I started out. I had no concept of art or photography whatsoever. I just wanted to be close to where the music came from,” Corbijn recalls.
Just as we finish listing the names of obscure musical side projects and performers to each other in order to confirm our mutual taste, his eyes glimmer at a brief mention of my British hometown of Leeds. “Sam Riley is from Leeds — well, Bradford actually,” he declares with some excitement. Corbijn’s relationship with the north of England runs deeper than that of the average Dutchman. Joy Division, who famously formed in the neighbouring city of Manchester, were the first notable band he was able to shoot as an inexperienced but canny young photographer. Decades later he would go on to direct the 2007 film Control, a gut-wrenching, black and white, feature-length portrait of the life and tragic death of Ian Curtis at just 23 years old, in which actor Riley takes on the role of Curtis. The story of the band’s enigmatic but electric frontman is one that haunts fans of the band and those who lived through the era of post-punk, new wave and synth sounds that erupted out of the end of the seventies and evolved into the nineties.
Corbijn’s photographs and filmmaking breathe life into Curtis’s ghost, but the photographer admits that one of the more peculiar aspects of documenting and memorialising the stories of Joy Division and its members is how casting actor Riley in the lead role in Control has blurred reality and fiction in his memory. “Every time I think of Ian Curtis, it’s Sam Riley’s face that appears in front of me.” He explains, “I spent so much more time with him while making the film than I ever spent with Ian Curtis himself. So that’s my ‘memory’.”
While Curtis’s life was cut desperately and unusually short, death is an inevitability we must all at some point embrace. For photographers with careers spanning more than half a century, it’s a finality they find themselves increasingly confronted by. Corbijn has been capturing not only musicians, but also painters, since his teen years, and many of his subjects have since slipped silently into history. Most recently, on 30 April 2026, German-Austrian painter Georg Baselitz passed away at the age of 88. Corbijn’s portraits of painters find a choreography in their bodily forms that perhaps only one so used to shooting rockstars could draw out. Posed upside down in his studio — a physical state he was famously known to paint in — Corbijn presents Baselitz’s final bow within his universe as a posthumous post on his Instagram feed. With a knowing smile, he admits, “It didn’t get very many likes, but I think it’s a very good picture. That’s probably because my Instagram following is mostly Depeche Mode fans.”
Considering how the death of his subjects this impacts his relationship with the photographs he has taken of them that become part of their legacy, Corbijn reveals that it is the subjectivity of his own creative decision-making that becomes most apparent to him. “When you hang a show, like this one at Fotografiska, you become aware that there are a lot of people in it that you can no longer re-do shoots with. When you shoot a lot, you do a shoot and then you make your choices and then, quite often, you forget about the rest of it over time. The choices become that shoot. But ten years ago I revisited my whole archive. I went through all the contact sheets to look at choices I didn’t make at the time, and I was surprised how many great pictures there were, and how sometimes I maybe didn’t choose the best picture at the time. Maybe I wanted to show off with a particular picture, like “look at me, I did this”, but that all goes away in the end.
Regardless of whether he agrees with the creative decisions he made twenty, thirty or forty years ago now, Corbijn’s conviction in his approach has allowed him to carve out a unique space for his own aesthetic experimentalism in pop and rock music. From the striking panoramic shots that became the artwork for U2’s seminal 1987 album The Joshua Tree, to the countless music videos he has directed — including the avant-garde visuals for Depeche Mode’s 1987 single Never Let Me Down Again and Nirvana’s 1993 hit Heart-Shaped Box — his singular style has illuminated the genius and charm of some of the world’s most unforgettable acts, cementing their place in visual culture, as well as his own.
While he believes it is important to remain undisturbed by your own influence, he argues that self-belief is essential: “Once you start thinking that your work might be important, it’s very hard to make that work. I find it much easier to do it almost accidentally.” Asked what advice he would give to the next generation of photographers, he adds, “I think there’s hope for everybody, you have to just believe in what you’re doing. Just don’t expect success straight away, and don’t think that photography is glamorous.”
Corbijn, Anton is on view now, until 20 September 2026, at Fotografiska Berlin. Follow Fotografiska on Instagram hier.
Text MILLY BURROUGHS.
