The living and the dead

At the heart of Anton Corbijn: The Living and the Dead is his autobiographical series a. somebody. For it, Corbijn posed in the guise of deceased rock stars like John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain and photographed himself in the rural setting of his birthplace, Strijen. Furthermore it shows an early series of the artist for which Anton Corbijn used his characteristic imagery to photograph burial monuments and life-sized sculptures instead of people. These very personal compositions reflect the intellectual liberation of the artist from the confines of a provincial upbringing and his parents’ Protestant fixation on life after death. The series are placed alongside a comprehensive selection from forty years of his photographic work.