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Exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, April 29-July 5, 2009  BUDAPEST Anton Corbijn’s retrospective offers an overview of the Dutch photographer's oeuvre, spanning thirty years from the early video clips to the recent portraits.Corbijn has experimented in wide-ranging areas of modern visual culture. This exhibition features short films and video clips, as well as designs for concert sets, book covers, and record sleeves. Photography, though, has always been his primary means of expression. Black-and-white photography is his absolute reference point. The style of his photos is distinguished by grainy development, and a sense of corporeal proximity, blurred, soft contours, features lost in shadows, eyes covered or averted, and an emphasis on hands, all within surprising, unusual compositions.  LUMU, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest The photographic oeuvre is presented in chronological order. The black-and-white documentary photos he made with a small-format camera between 1973 and 1989 feature musicians only. The Star Trak series shows the period after 1989. The series features artists, models, actors and directors, as well as musicians. The viewpoint is generally closer, the presentation often frontal, usually in a natural environment, and the pieces are more likely to be considered portrait photography. He uses the technique to this day, although that special paper is no longer made and he will run out of the material very soon. The 33 Still Lives series were taken between 1997 and 2000. Blown up to poster size, these filtered monochrome-like photos - with an overwhelming sense of blue. Most of the people photographed were either actors, directors or musicians with a link to the film world. The series represent a mysterious world, and look like old movie posters bleached by sunlight.  Miles Davis, by Anton Corbijn a.somebody is a series of self-portraits made in 2001-2002, where Corbijn took a closer look at his upbringing and the effect it had on his obsession with music., and to a lesser degress, film. The series has two parts: the first includes shots taken outdoors, creating a sense of the landscape he grew up in and which was to influence his compositions later on. The black-and white portraits of the second part are more emphatic about the obsession, and simply comically sad. Anton Corbijn has been closely tied to the band Depeche Mode for over 20 years, and to their history and image of this cult band. The band members insist that corbijn’s photos and visual approach had a key influence on how the reassessed and reinvented their music.  Depeche Mode, by Anton Corbijn The museum also presents videos Corbijn made between 1988 and 2005, which became symbols of the visual and musical cultures of that time. This photographer lives between showing himself and closing himself off to and from the world. It’s increasingly important for him to leave an impression of peoples’ sould. He knows fear of death from close up, and survival’s many facets. It’s important for him to not idealize, but to transform everything through the sieve of fantasy. To take out of ourselves the dark powers, our lives’ distinguishing important experiences.  The photographer: devil with angelic tendencies? Seeing his pictures we question what is believable? To be yourself, no matter what? Don’t be ashamed of what you are, just accept it? Sex, drugs and rock and roll?Is art like love? Isn’t love a calm way of being? All our cells are in movement, changing, and is this what causes and at the same time gives up great pleasure? Desired goal, reachable live goal... is reaching harmony possible? In moments of important change, in different life experiences, finding a way to exist? Is what we do in out personal lives only up to us? Did we get the talents, abilities and means to live the kind of life in which we believe? And Anton Corbijn? For himself! Bookmark us: 
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