UNEASY Anton Corbjin
My friend Rick McGinnis and I felt very alone in Toronto in the mid-eighties, our interest in making moody pictures of pop stars put us mostly in the head scratching area for other photographers and photo editors. Anton Corbijn was our quiet hero, shooting for the New Musical Express in England creating rock photographs that meant something, or at least looked like they did.
We met up with him in his hotel room in downtown Toronto in 1987 where we interviewed and photographed him. His album art for U2’s The Joshua Tree had recently raised his profile in the U.S. and Canada. Here is an abridged version of your interview.
Rick McGinnis: What was the first photo you took for the New Musical Express?
The first was Bill Haley.
Chris Buck: That’s sort of appropriate.
It is, yeah. Back in ‘55, the beginning of rock n’ roll.
I met the editor of the NME, prior to this, and he had said, “Come to England we could give you work.” I turned up on his doorstep when I moved to England and he was kind of embarrassed. He showed me around the office and said, “This guy’s from Holland, he’s very good. Who wants to give him work?” Everybody went like this (hunches over), they start writing, nobody answering. He said, “Oh sure, there must be somebody”, and then one guy said, “Well, nobody wants to do this job.” It was Bill Haley playing the Marquee, or some such venue.
In January, I did my first front cover - I did two in a row. That was in three months time of my arrival to England.
CB: Wow.
It was really fast. And then in 1980 I did a lot of things for the NME - and up until 1983 really I became the main photographer, I guess.
RM: Who did you admire as photographers?
At the moment I really like Robert Frank and Dorothea Lange. Josef Sudek, Cartier-Bresson I also liked - I just went to his exhibition in Europe it covered the years 1930-32 when he had just discovered printing. From the new photography I quite like Helmut Newton, still. I’m not so happy with all those new photographers that they seem to push forward every year, be it Bruce Weber or Robert Mapplethorpe. I can see they have qualities but I’m not really inspired by them that much.
RM: Most of the photographers you mentioned have a European sensibility.
…with the exception of Dorothea Lange.
RM: Do you think that your work fits into…
Oh yeah, I think I’m very European in my views, and I really like Eastern European photographers. I’ve been to Russia a few times and a lot of quite well-known photographers come from Hungary like Kertesz. And Sudek is from Czechoslovakia. There is something in the European eye that is different from the American eye. I think that there’s more left over to the imagination in the end. And that’s what makes a good photograph - that you leave space for a viewer to sort of jump into a photograph and be part of it.
Annie Leibovitz therefore fails in my eyes to be a good photographer because what she does is totally closed off. She has an idea, she creates it and she does it perfectly. But by doing it like that I think she kills it. There is no room for you to jump in and join - it’s just there.
CB: It’s almost scientific.
Yes. I think you need to keep things alive. For it to live longer, basically. In Europe they’re quite good at that, be it on purpose or through the character of the people.
CB: U2 seem to have this myth building thing with their image, The Joshua Tree cover and associated photographs seem to be a big part of that. Do you see things that way?
Well, after the photographs were taken, they looked bigger than they ever were intended…it just happened like that.
CB: How do you mean, “Bigger”?
Like you said, the myth of U2. I never realized the pictures would work out the way they did with Joshua Tree, where I think they look stronger, really, than any other band in the world. I think they’re great but I think I’ll always build on, what I think I just explained, about leaving things open and alive. That applied to U2 - shooting with them creates a photography that really becomes quite big and speaks to a lot of people.
I’m not sitting at my desk thinking that I have to create something that helps create this myth about U2. It’s almost accidental. It’s a combination of them and me. The way that the session went, I’d been talking with Bono for over a year about doing something in deserts. First they were going to go to Africa, but while they were working on this record they realized that it was very inspired by America, therefore we would use an American desert. I was sent off, I think late November of last year, to find something in the area of Los Angeles. I went to loads of places, and I made a sort of route that we could cover in four days, we could cover a lot of area.
They flew over and we set off but they didn’t have a title yet for the album. I explained to Bono one night about the Joshua Tree and how good an image it would make photography-wise. He liked it, and the next morning he came to me and said, “I’ve got it, it’s the perfect title.”
I had rented a panoramic camera I’d never worked with before, and I didn’t realize it was focused on infinity and you couldn’t change the focus, and I didn’t realize any of that until I developed my film - I still take quite a lot of chances.
Top Image: Alternate portrait of Corbjin by Chris Buck
Second Image: Buck photographing Corbijn by Rick McGinnis
Bottom Image: Rick McGinnis and Anton Corbijn.
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