Review: Outstanding photos by Anton Corbijn at Fotografiska
With its grainy, black and white images of artists and groups such as U2, Nick Cave and Tom Waits, Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn has created a very own aesthetic. His record covers, rock videos and portraits are immediately recognizable time pictures from the rock history of the last 50 years.
Corbijn himself has made the selection for the retrospective exhibition at Fotografiska. And although much is familiar, such as the tender portrait of the outsider Captain Beefheart in the Mojave Desert or David Bowie in a diaper -like Sumod costume at the time of « Scary Monsters », there are also a number of unknown pictures to me in a more modest format.
These square images, which occupy a wall in the exhibition, are relaxed and low -key snapshots by musicians, directors and actors who have been depicted in their Californian everyday life.
Here is also a series Experimental images where Corbijn worked with a flashlight and color filter as the only lighting, which reflects the applicant the expression of musicians such as Brian Eno and David Byrne.
However, it all begins in ominous. In the first room of the exhibition, Corbijn shows a number of photographs where he himself dressed up to rock stars such as Kurt Cobain and Frank Zappa, a puffy mask that watered down both their aura and his own design language.
If someone turns in the door, it is understandable, but unfortunate. The rest of the exhibition shows that Anton Corbijn is an outstanding photographer, who has both stuck to his original expression and developed over time.
In interviews Corbijn Told that he was very shy as a young person, but with the camera as a shield he dared to approach his youth idols. He has followed many of them for several decades, which has created a trust between him and the musicians and contributes to the intimate character of the portrait.
By this time, Corbijn himself has reached the age of 70, and many of the artists in the pictures are now either dead or old. Several of them are certainly unknown to a younger audience, such as German reggae pointer Nina Hagen and Ari Up from the punk band The Slits, here depicted in a partially undressed double portrait.
The fact that the selection reflects Corbijn’s own taste of music is obvious, which is both a strength and a weakness. He has a particularly good eye for Artsy, white rock music, but is obviously less interested in female artists and black music history.
The pictures of the blues legend John Lee Hooker in the front seat of a car and an blurry portrait of a blinding Neneh Cherry is a couple of the few exceptions confirming the rule.
In addition to the uniform color range- usually black and white, sometimes blue or sepiatonade- Corbijn feels above all that he often works with natural light, half-figure and a standing image format. In a quote from Tom Waits, he is described as a mixture of « a Russian spy, a gigolo, a priest and an artist ».
What it means is not entirely clear, but from a language artist like Waits it is a high rating. For us ordinary mortals, it may be enough to note that Anton Corbijn is one of the foremost visual depictions of the last half -century rock history.
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