Anton Corbijn Quotes

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.

I'm a very, very basic photographer. The main strength of my pictures, I guess, is the mood and feel I get out of the people that I meet. But technically I don't think I'm very advanced. That never interested me.

Grain is life, there's all this striving for perfection with digital stuff. Striving is fine, but getting there is not great. I want a sense of the human and that is what breathes life into a picture. For me, imperfection is perfection.

I don’t crop my images and I always shoot handheld. By doing that I build in a kind of imperfection and this helps to emphasize reality.

I work using the Brian Eno school of thinking: limit your tools, focus on one thing and just make it work… You become very inventive with the restrictions you give yourself.

My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

By self-analysis you can not change your character, but you may change your mentality.

Sometimes you don't know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. I have a nice picture of myself held up by my grandfather and my father standing next to me. We all have the same name - we're all called Anton Corbijn. That's something I cherish.

Photography has taken me from isolation.

My way in for photographing people is really their work. I'm always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that's the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first.

I've gotten used to not looking too far into the future; it's best when you can begin each day anew.

With photography, you are lucky if you get people to look at your pictures at some point. There's no formal way to show them.

I have such a love of good music that I find even melancholic music uplifting. Maybe I'm a rare breed.

Body language is so important, as is composition. You can not say something, and then the body reacts, and it says a lot of things dialogue can also say.

My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.

I think some people need the assurance of people around them and ideas worked out in advance. I think it keeps me an edge that to be creative on the spot. You have to think of things to do when you meet people. You limit your choices from the beginning. So I don't bring a lot of lenses, cameras, all these elements that can help the picture to a shooting. You confine yourself to, say, one room and you just make it work. You become very creative in that little space. You have left a lot of other options out of the game.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I think the fact that you have long - term relationships, this is a very unusual thing in the world, and I thought it was fantastic because you build up a trust. Each time you photograph the person, you try to do something else.

There's a lot about records that you cannot feel from a CD.

I never really enjoyed getting a portfolio together then sending it out; whereas, putting up the website is quite an enjoyable experience. The net's just a much faster and more modern way to distribute things, and you have to embrace it.

I don't think I treat my film work as an extension of my photography. There are two different sets of rules there.

I'm actually not so sure what I'm hoping to find making photographs. You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people. I don't know how I go about it. I also don't know how exactly what I set out to get other than these two things.

Apart from photography and music videos, I also do graphic design.

I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.

My life changed incredibly when I moved from Holland to England.

I am a village boy, and Amsterdam for me was always the big town.

The really simple approach to photography is a great balance to making the films.

Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.

There's only one music video that had an emotional impact on me, and that's "Hurt" by Johnny Cash. That's exceptional. There is no music video I can think of apart from that one that really reaches you inside.

I come unprepared to shooting. I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland. I was given very little time to photograph people and I was very scared.

For me N.M.E. was a very big thing. When I first came to the United Kingdom I started taking pictures for them and I became their main photographer for five years, and that's really been the basis of everything I've been doing since.

I feel that when I shoot anything, and I have something beautiful, I just move on.

It's only when people get involved, when there's money involved, that you have a lot opinions around you. I try not to listen to them too much.