Anton Corbijn Beyond Music: Self-Portraits, Painters and Fashion

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MODE UNKNOWN · ANTON CORBIJN · Chapter 11 of 20

The phrase rock photographer is too narrow for a career that repeatedly questions what a portrait is and how a public identity is made. The work with painters, the conceptual series and the fashion photographs are not peripheral exceptions. They offer some of the clearest ways to understand the larger project.

a.somebody: the photographer becomes the subject

In a.somebody, made in 2001–2002, Corbijn photographed himself as deceased musicians in his birthplace, Strijen. The museum account names figures including Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious and John Lennon. (Kunstmuseum Den Haag) This is a decisive reversal: the maker of recognisable portraits becomes the person performing recognisability.

The series can be read as a test of how little information is needed for an identity to emerge. A pose, costume or silhouette may summon a person who is not actually there. The viewer participates by supplying a memory. The photograph therefore contains both the body before the camera and the absent figure imagined by the audience.

It also changes the meaning of the home landscape. A place associated with beginnings becomes a setting for impersonation and remembrance. The contrast between the familiar location and the borrowed identity makes the act of staging particularly apparent.

33 Still Lives: a photograph of a film that does not exist

The late-1990s 33 Still Lives series uses the appearance of cinema and publicity to suggest scenes from nonexistent films. (Kunstmuseum Den Haag) That premise makes it a useful bridge between portrait photography and later filmmaking.

A film still seems to promise a larger story outside the frame. We imagine a before and an after. When no actual film supplies them, the viewer has to create those missing events. The picture turns an expectation learned from cinema into its own material.

Painters and the working environment

Inwards and Onwards returns to portraiture with particular attention to visual artists. (Kunstmuseum Den Haag) In his conversation with Alain Elkann, Corbijn discusses photographing figures including Lucian Freud and Ai Weiwei, and the difference between approaching painters in their working spaces and musicians away from instruments. (Alain Elkann Interviews)

The studio can carry information without functioning as a straightforward explanation of a person. Materials, surfaces and unfinished work make a setting feel used. The portrait becomes an encounter between a body and the evidence of activity around it.

There is also a reversal of expertise. The subject is someone who makes images and is now being made into one. That does not guarantee conflict, but it gives the encounter an extra intellectual interest. Both participants may be acutely aware of framing, representation and the consequences of a pose.

Fashion as a form of portraiture

MOØDe examines the meeting of portrait photography and fashion. Museum Cobra describes Corbijn as a portrait photographer who sometimes enters fashion, rather than a fashion photographer who occasionally makes portraits. (Museum Cobra) The distinction places the person at the centre of the commission.

Clothing is nevertheless active material. It can exaggerate a silhouette, suggest a role, interrupt familiarity or establish a relationship with the setting. A fashion image need not conceal that construction. It can make the act of presenting oneself the very thing being photographed.

The agency’s Haute Couture selection provides a separate route into commissioned work. (2b Management) Compare its presentation with the conceptual self-portraits: in both, appearance is chosen, but the commission, audience and purpose differ.

Why these works change the music photographs

After looking at the self-portraits and invented film stills, it becomes harder to divide the archive into truthful portraits and artificial performances. A portrait can be staged and still be revealing. A spontaneous gesture can still be shaped by a public role. The productive question is what the construction lets us see.

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