control
there were three moments in my life that nudged me into photography. this post is about the first.
u2’s achtung baby (still one of the greatest albums ever) changed my life in 1991. it was the brilliant combination of radical: songwriting, production, management and photography. this post is about the last.
in 1991 albums were still about more than music, it was an experience, and an important part of the experience for anyone that listened to u2 or depeche mode was anton corbijn because he created the look and feel of that experience. 1991 was the year i fell in love with music on my own (my mom was in love with music so until 1991 i shared interest in whatever she was listening to) and i fell in love with photography solely because of the incredible photos i stared at in the achtung baby cd insert. 1991 was the year i got my first guitar and wrote my first song. it’d be a few more years before i took my first photos. it’d be even later that i’d learn that my dad had been a songwriter and photographer as well when he was my age.
i was thinking about it tonight because i FINALLY got around to watching Control, the movie about joy division that was directed by anton corbijn. the camera work is good (of course) and the casting is perfect (samantha morton is incredible) but somehow the movie didn’t tell me or move me as much as the far better ‘24 Party People’ did (which i just watched a few days ago and LOVED), despite joy division only playing a small role in the latter movie. i think part of it is that anton shot the movie black and white, which is often his style, but it’s such a distortion from the real england that it makes what was actually a true story somehow less believable. i guess i expected that a master of imagery, as corbijn is, would find the way to tell the story of how alt-gloom bands like joy division (or the cure, or depeche mode or the smiths, etc) rose from what seems to me to be a relatively colorful england. the movie ‘this is england’ (one of my favorites) does a much better job of showing and reconciling the dark side of england with its colorful environment. i guess it’s an important reminder for myself (and anyone else that considers themselves a photographer): having your own style is fine but if your business is storytelling then don’t let your style get in the way of the story.
the following are photos from the brilliant anton corbijn http://www.corbijn.co.uk/
my favs are the depeche mode ones because i appreciate the subtle but consistent theme of putting dave gahan (the frontman) up front but martin gore (the one who writes depeche mode’s music) in focus:
The control by Dancing Before Diana, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
