Anton Corbijn Beyond Depeche Mode: Waits, Nirvana and Other Creative Encounters

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MODE UNKNOWN · ANTON CORBIJN · Chapter 9 of 20

Any account of Corbijn limited to two major bands would leave out much of his range. The wider work includes recurring friendships, single encounters, album collaborations and highly concentrated video commissions. Those relationships should not be assumed to have the same duration or character simply because the photographs appear in the same retrospective.

Tom Waits: a dialogue across time

Waits/Corbijn ’77–’11 was published in 2013, bringing together Corbijn’s portraits and material by Waits himself, including a section of Waits’s own photographs. (Pitchfork) The structure matters: the subject is not merely displayed but contributes another way of looking.

A sustained portrait sequence can show both change and continuity. Clothing, age, gesture and setting vary, yet the person remains recognisable. The interest is not confined to identifying which image is the most famous. A sequence can make the intervals between photographs meaningful.

With a performer whose public identity already contains theatrical invention, the portrait also raises a productive question: does it reveal a person behind the role, or does it collaborate in the role’s creation? The answer need not be exclusive. A staged image can be expressive without pretending to be an unguarded private moment.

Nirvana: the artist’s idea and the director’s realisation

Heart-Shaped Box is a crucial example of collaborative authorship. Corbijn directed the 1993 video, but Kurt Cobain’s visual ideas were central to its conception. Corbijn discusses the collaboration in his Radio X interview. (Radio X ▶) The film’s intensely artificial colour and unsettling imagery offer a strong counterexample to the assumption that Corbijn’s moving-image work is uniformly monochrome. (Elephant)

The critical question is how an idea becomes a sustained visual environment. Props, performers, colour treatment, movement and the organisation of space have to belong to the same film. A list of striking images is not automatically a coherent moving work. The director’s contribution includes making those images operate together through time.

Don Van Vliet: between music and painting

Some YoYo Stuff is a short film made with Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart. Corbijn’s agency dates the work to 1993; some catalogues use 1994, so production and circulation dates should not be casually conflated. (2b Management) (Captain Beefheart Radar Station / Graham)

Van Vliet is a particularly useful subject for this collection because he makes the division between musician and visual artist feel insufficient. A portrait can approach a creative person across different forms of work without forcing all of them into the category in which the public first encountered that person.

The wider constellation

The 2015 1-2-3-4 exhibition assembled a broad musical selection, including artists such as Nick Cave, Siouxsie Sioux, R.E.M., Nirvana and the Rolling Stones. (Fotomuseum Den Haag) That breadth encourages comparison across different kinds of public persona rather than a simple roll call of famous names.

Try grouping portraits by a visual decision instead of by genre: figures photographed at a distance, faces partly withheld, settings that contradict glamour, or bodies arranged as if in a small performance. Such a grouping can reveal the photographer’s questions without implying that the people themselves are interchangeable.

Collaboration as the central subject

The most useful connecting idea is not celebrity access. It is the negotiation between two creative identities. A person arrives with a history, an appearance and some sense of how they wish to be seen. The photographer arrives with another way of looking. The resulting picture can confirm, complicate or play with that public image.

This is why the wider work belongs at the centre of a Corbijn collection. It demonstrates that the camera’s relationship to a subject is an encounter, not a fixed treatment that can simply be applied to anyone.

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