“I consider myself a portrait photographer who often photographs musicians,” writes Anton Corbijn in the opening essay of his new book, Anton Corbijn 1-2-3-4 (Prestel). Though the Dutch lensman—who famously shot the cover of U2’s The Joshua Tree in the Mohave Desert’s Death Valley—says he’s fought the music photographer label throughout his four-decade career, he allows such shots to be the focus of this project. “I want to celebrate my work in the music world, without having to apologize for it,” he writes. Corbijn is known for shooting very few frames and he poured through thousands of negatives gathered from 1972 to 2013 before identifying 300 for the book that accompanies an exhibition of 400 images, 1-2-3-4, on view through August 16, at the Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. Such focus and exactitude is as rare as camera film in this digital shutterbug era. Many of the images—one can hardly call them outtakes if there were only 4 takes—have never been published. Corbijn’s shots are composed, yet each retains a vibrant, off-the-cuff quality. Tom Waits sits on a chair in the middle of a Santa Rosa intersection. Michael Stipe wears a mask made of blue paint as he smokes a cigarette in London. Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode is lit like a Christmas tree in Marrakech. Joni Mitchell is wrapped in a Navajo blanket on the West Dorset Coast. As Corbijn, who directed Control, a film about the band Joy Division, continues to make movies, the exhibition and book may be his farewell to still photography. But the final image taken along the 101 just leaves us wanting more.

By Elizabeth Varnell

 

Pictured: Tom Waits, Santa Rosa, 2004
Photo by: Anton Corbijn

 

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