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“I’m not interested in perfection; I want to show the cracks that let the soul out.” – Anton Corbijn

I was in Berlin for Out Of Line Weekender, but there are obligations that have nothing to do with schedules and everything to do with devotion. Fotografiska’s new Anton Corbijn exhibition was one of them. For me, as a portrait and concert photographer, someone who also photographs musicians and keeps returning to faces as if they might finally confess something essential, Anton Corbijn belongs to that tiny order of artists who stand above influence. Alongside Helmut Newton, Henri Cartier Bresson, and Peter Lindbergh, he occupies the place reserved for gods and impossible standards, the figures one follows knowing perfectly well they cannot be caught.

That is why walking into Corbijn, Anton at Fotografiska Berlin felt less like a casual museum stop and more like entering a sanctuary built for people who understand that music history has a face, and that in many cases Corbijn gave it one.

The exhibition opened on Friday with a party, and that choice made perfect sense. Anton Corbijn has spent more than four decades shaping the visual identity of modern music through photography, videos, and film, so to celebrate him with silence alone would have felt strangely insufficient. Fotografiska turned the museum into a living nocturnal structure, with an artist talk by Anton Corbijn himself, then performances by Sally Dige, Pol, Isolation Berlin, Drangsal, and Anika, while Daisy Weweh and DJ Hell took over Bar Veronika and the Café Bar moved through its own sequence of DJs and live setsIt was not so much a vernissage as a carefully tuned occupation of the building, the kind of opening that understands that Corbijn’s work has always lived somewhere between contemplation and afterhours voltage.

The retrospective itself traces his photographic journey from the nineteen seventies to the present, and what becomes immediately clear is that Anton Corbijn never photographed fame as fame. He photographed aura, fragility, distance, inner weather. His pictures do not flatter celebrity. They interrogate it, strip it, sometimes wound it a little, then offer it back to us with more truth than glamour could ever survive.

There is something almost unbelievable about the accumulation of presences in these rooms. It feels like entering a party where the entire subconscious of the nineteen eighties and nineties has gathered under one roof. Nick Cave is there. Blixa Bargeld is there. Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie, Joy Division, Björk, Annie Lennox, Martin Gore, Courtney Love, Slash. The effect is almost surreal. Slash can sit next to Cave and somehow the conversation still makes visual sense. Corbijn’s eye gives the room an unusual coherence. Across decades, genres, and personas, these figures seem to belong to the same emotional climate.

Anton Corbijn expo – Photo review by Karo Kratochwil

And that eye remains devastating.

The black and white work is especially overwhelming. Anton Corbijn understands monochrome the way certain writers understand silence. In his hands, black and white begins as an aesthetic choice and ends as a moral one. It removes decorative noise. It forces structure, mood, doubt, bone. Faces emerge from shadow with that strange mix of vulnerability and self possession that the best portraits carry. The grain matters. The blur matters. The lack of polish matters. In room after room, one sees what Corbijn meant by those cracks that let the soul out. The line immediately brought Leonard Cohen to my mind: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Corbijn’s portraits seem to trust the same principle. Perfection closes a surface. Fracture lets a person appear. An Anton Corbijn portrait is not about smoothness or glamour; it rather wants tension, atmosphere, the unstable edge where a person stops performing and starts appearing.

That blurred line is one of the great subjects of the exhibition. Between public figure and private self: between star and somebody, costume and exposure. One of the wall texts includes Corbijn’s remark that he never wanted to be a photographer of the stars, he wanted to show what was behind that. It is one of those statements that sounds simple until one stands in front of the photographs and realizes how rare that ambition actually is. Plenty of photographers have documented famous people. Very few have been able to make fame feel secondary.

What gives the Berlin show its particular richness is the way Corbijn transforms a room full of cultural icons into something far more intimate and unsettling: a study in emotional weather, written across faces. Again and again, one encounters the same quality in those hypnotic eyes that seem to look through the lens rather than into it, whether they belong to Bowie, Björk, Annie Lennox, or Siouxsie. Decades shift, styling changes, California light replaces a harsher European grain, yet Corbijn keeps locating that inward pull, that faintly haunted concentration which makes each portrait feel less like an image than an encounter.

For those of us who photograph musicians, the lesson is brutal and beautiful at once. Anton Corbijn never seemed interested in access for its own sake – he was famously uncompromising, guided less by commercial calculation than by instinct, taste, and conviction. The very idea that he could initially turn away from photographing massively successful acts feels entirely plausible here, because the exhibition makes clear that market value was never the real currency of Anton Corbijn’s work; what mattered was presence, mystery, and the human face under pressure.

That also explains why the exhibition never feels embalmed in nostalgia. There is far too much movement inside it for that. One section follows Anton Corbijn’s deeply personal series a. somebody, where he steps into the skins of his musical heroes in self portraits made in his hometown of Strijen. Another shows Famous, the early black and white portraits that already contain the raw directness of his mature vision. Elsewhere, MOØDe explores fashion as a psychological instrument rather than surface. The clothes in these photographs are not decoration. They are mood, armor, confession.

Then there is the room devoted to the moving image, and it is impossible to overstate how important that room is. Corbijn photographed modern music, then went on to shape the way it moved. Seeing the videos and film material gathered there, one is reminded how much of the MTV era and after it still bears his grammar. Depeche Mode, U2, Nirvana, Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Joy Division by way of Control – the list alone is enough to make you stop. More importantly, the room reveals continuity rather than career hopping. That same visual intelligence runs through the still photographs, the videos, and the films, along with the patience with darkness, the suspicion of perfection, and the rare ability to let stillness accumulate dramatic force without any hint of coercion. Perhaps that is what moved me most deeply, the way Anton Corbijn’s work remains vibrantly alive even when the subject barely appears to move, as though everything were held in a state of concentrated tension. It places its trust in the viewer and asks for real attention, which in an age devoted to speed, polish, and instant legibility begins to feel almost radical. I went in knowing I admired him. I left with something closer to gratitude.

For me, this exhibition was deeply personal, because it gave precise form to something I had sensed for years without ever quite naming: the strongest portrait photography does not take possession of a face, but waits until that face begins, almost against its will, to disclose itself. Anton Corbijn has spent a lifetime working from exactly that conviction, and it explains why his photographs still seem to breathe, still carry risk, still hold something that refuses to flatten into mere cultural memory. At Fotografiska, that quality runs through the entire exhibition, giving it the presence of something living rather than the composure of a museum exercise.And yes, it truly felt like visiting a temple.

The kind of temple where the saints wear black, the lighting is severe, the music never really stops, and you realise, after far too long standing in front of one wall, that you have no desire to leave.

“Corbijn, Anton” is on view at Fotografiska Berlin from 9 May through 20 September 2026

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.

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