ANTON CORBIJN アントン・コービン

Anton Corbijn’s photographs are far from perfect. They can be grainy, blurred, and distorted; sometimes unconventional in composition, or breaking the rules of form. And yet it is precisely these imperfections that give his work its signature gritty style that has become his unmistakable trademark.

The Dutch photographer was born in 1955 and raised by a family of minis-ters in a conservative village near Rotterdam. Music became an escape from this reality. “Music was, I guess in my mind, an amazing world – liberal and exciting,” he says. At 17, when they just moved to a bigger town in the north of Holland, Corbijn borrowed his father’s old camera to photograph a band in the town square. He sent the photos to a music magazine, and they were picked up. In the following decade, he went on to become the NME’s official photographer and created images of some of the most influential cultural figures of our time – from musicians and artists to designers, models, paint-ers, and cultural figures.

This exhibition presents nearly 100 works across 50 years of his career, beginning with some of his earliest portraits and ending with Cemetery , a series of photographs taken in graveyards around Europe in the 1980s. Whether stone or star, Cobijn always aims to reveal a deeper layer of psychology and presence. “There’s a very human touch to my work,” he says. And it is through this touch – imperfect and unpolished – that the many characters in his images come to life in a way we have never seen before.