Even for a Dutchman, Anton Corbijn is rather tall. Michael Stipe (of REM) once observed that Corbijn’s height gives him a unique perspective, which is one of the reasons why his images are so special. But as he lopes between the trees, deep in the Italian Dolomites, it occurs to me that this is not a man who could ever have flown under the radar in pursuit of the perfect image. Certainly not in a bright red puffa jacket.
Not that he ever wanted to fit in. Unquestionably one of the greatest photographers of all time, Corbijn’s career took flight when he joined the NME in the late '70s. Also a well-regarded film director (2007’s Control and 2010’s The American are two stand-outs), he’s responsible for the defining images of some of the world’s most famous musicians. Look at album artwork for U2’s The Joshua Tree (1987) or Achtung Baby (1991) and you don’t just see the band, you hear the music. He did much the same for Depeche Mode – the imagery and videos as crucial to their transition from flighty Basildon synthpop boy-band to saturnine guitar-slinging stadium behemoths as anything they actually recorded.
David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, REM, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Naomi Campbell, Damien Hirst… Corbijn has photographed them all. His image of the late Virgil Abloh, taken outside Chicago’s Museum of Modern Art, was shot through one of the building’s coloured windows.
Today, he is an Italian forest with a different type of subject. This one is trickier than most because cars are obviously not people, and even the most evasive human subject will eventually give you something. On the other hand, this is Lamborghini’s new Revuelto we’re talking about. Everywhere you look there’s a curve, duct or the sort of flamboyant swoop you don’t find on ordinary cars. There’s also a 6.5-litre V12 in the mix, aided by three electric motors for a total power output of just over 1,000bhp. That's 9,500rpm capable of running silently in electric mode.
Corbijn grew up with Volvos and VW Beetles, and helped transform the unloved and unloveable East German Trabant into a global fashion statement during U2’s adventures in post-modernism. So if anyone can anthropomorphise a Lamborghini, it’ll be Anton Corbijn.
“People say that I have a style, and I always think that style is defined by your inability to do it any other way. I didn’t have an education in photography so I’m just making do with what I have," Corbijn tells GQ. “If minimise your choices and become very inventive with the little things you have left, you find ways to make something if you don’t have all the possibilities. I learned that from Brian Eno, actually.”
Corbijn began his career in Holland photographing local rock musicians, an experience he says taught him to work fast because he rarely had much time with them. Even now, he doesn’t hang around.
“In a way, photography is my personal journey, and the photograph reflects the meeting. I’m not studio based, I make a journey to photograph somebody. The whole trip is connected to the image, and you get a little bit more from that person if you go to their environment. You have to approach people and talk to them to take a picture. That helped me a lot.”
Corbijn has also maintained something of an outsider perspective, perhaps down to the way he managed to gatecrash the notoriously insular and self-regarding world of the late '70s British music press. “It’s important to look at things from the outside. People call me a rock photographer but I’m really not. I like to go beyond the area that I’m known for.”
It’s a noble aim and has led to greater personal artistic expression. Yet Corbijn’s back catalogue includes work that's fundamental to several bands' musical direction. It’s all there in the sleeve art accompanying U2’s War, Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree albums so much so that it’s difficult to imagine one without the other. Then there’s the image he took of Joy Division, loitering near the escalator at Lancaster Gate underground.
“That was the aim, for me to make photographs that connect to what the people were doing. The Joy Division picture is a good example of that. Three people walking away, one looking back, it’s like a trip to unknown pleasures. They don’t know where they’re going. I used their bodies to symbolise the music. Nobody wanted to publish that picture at the time but the band really liked it and asked me to photograph them again. That was just prior to Ian [Curtis’s] passing. After he died, everyone loved it, because it was like a premonition or something.”
As for The Joshua Tree, it has its roots in Captain Beefheart, another great Corbijn subject. “I was looking for desert locations. I went on a five-day trip in California, and then the band came over,” he recalls. “We spent two and a half days shooting. On the first evening in the desert, I told Bono about this tree, which I’d seen for the first time with Captain Beefheart in 1980, because he lived near there. And he was quite taken with that. The next morning he came downstairs with a bible in his hands. Then he said, We have to find this Joshua tree.”
As fickle as the photography world is, Corbijn remains a true artist. “I try to keep authenticity in my work. It’s really difficult because visuals are very popular and everyone is a photographer now, so it’s difficult to make your mark,” he concedes. “But that’s why you should really stick to your own thing. I shoot fast, in a kind of documentary approach. My work in the beginning was very brave because nobody really liked it. You have to believe in yourself and keep doing it. Plus, I had no idea what else to do.”
Back to the here and now, stood here in a mountain range in northern Italy, there are no rock stars, but plenty of rocky cliff faces and a rock star car. It’s an unusual addition to the Corbijn canon, so why this car?
“Lamborghini represents sophistication in cars. It is a beautiful, sophisticated and chic name for any product. We chose the Dolomites to make the car feel like it’s a foreign body in the forest, like an animal raring to go,” Corbijn says. “Nature is fantastic to work in but it’s very difficult because nature is usually so beautiful it takes over. The car balances out the beauty of the forest with its visual power. I’m a Taurus myself, so I appreciate the roots of the Revuelto’s name. The car is a sculpture and yet it moves damn fast.”
