Chapter 1 · 1955–1979: Finding a Way into Music
MODE UNKNOWN · ANTON CORBIJN · CHAPTER 1 OF 6
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A beginning in the Netherlands
Anton Corbijn was born in Strijen in 1955. His early story begins with music and the possibility of getting close to it. Photography offered a practical way into a world that otherwise seemed remote. The camera became both a reason to approach musicians and a way of observing without having to occupy the centre of attention.
1972: the borrowed camera
In 1972 he began photographing concerts with his father’s camera. This is the first major working milestone in the collection’s chronology. The significance is not that a finished signature style arrived immediately, but that he found a practice he could develop through repeated encounters with performers. Looking, waiting and making choices became a means of participation.
Learning to recognise an atmosphere
The later photographs are often discussed in terms of grain, black and white, distance and imperfect surfaces. Those qualities matter because of what they allow an image to communicate. A musician can appear vulnerable or remote; an ordinary setting can become emotionally charged. Reading the early years through that later work is useful, provided it does not turn the beginning into a story of inevitable success.
Towards London
By 1979, Corbijn’s commitment to music photography would take him to London. That move opens the next chapter. It also marks a change in scale: the private impulse to find a place near music became a working life within its public culture. The detailed early-years essay below preserves his own accounts and an embedded interview about how he became a photographer.