There are moments you cannot prepare for. Not really. You can plan to visit an exhibition, set aside an evening, even look forward to it a little. But what actually awaits you cannot be anticipated. Last night at Fotografiska Berlin, I was reminded of that again.
The museum’s entrance greets you with a charm that feels almost deliberately modern. Bright, clear, precise. The ticket counters, the staff, everything composed like a prologue that gives nothing away. I showed my ticket, walked on, and then, within just a few steps, entered a completely different world.
Fotografiska is housed in the old Tacheles building, and anyone who knows the history of that place knows there’s more to it than square footage and floors. The stairwell you enter after the ticket counters is covered, floor to ceiling, in graffiti. Not the smooth, curated street art you find framed in galleries. Something rawer. More honest. The steps themselves are old, grey concrete, here and there touched with color, but above all, worn. Used. By how many people, across how many decades?
I reached for the railing. Cold. Metal. And in that moment, the exhibition began for me. Not upstairs on the third floor, not in front of the first photograph. Here. Hand on the railing, first step. That was the real threshold.
Slightly out of breath, I reached the landing of the third floor. I stopped. Not because I had to, but because I instinctively felt the moment deserved something. The old steel doors of the stairwell stand on their own. They are not a neutral passage, not a mere gateway. Looked at properly, they are already an art installation in themselves. Weathered, silent, dignified. You sense they have witnessed things we can only guess at now.
Then through the doors. Into Anton Corbijn’s world.
I am not an art critic. I cannot analyse an exhibition, place a composition with expertise, or name a photographic technique. What I can do is describe how images affect me. And Anton’s images have been doing something to me for decades. Something I have always felt but never quite managed to put into words.
The exhibited photographs are largely black-and-white portraits. Of the artists I know. Faces I know. Names woven into my life. Interspersed among the portraits are images from his video productions, glimpses into a body of work far larger than any single frame. I don’t want to retell the exhibition photograph by photograph. That wouldn’t be fair. Not to the exhibition, and not to what happened inside me last night.
What struck me was something else entirely.
In a deeply darkened room, selected music videos are projected onto the walls. Large. Powerful. It is not simply a screen in a corner. It is an environment. You step into it. I sat down on a bench and let image and sound wash over me. Into me. Tried to stay open.
Then came “Enjoy the Silence.”
Most people who listened to music anywhere on this planet in the nineties know that song. The video, Dave Gahan in a red royal cape, wandering alone through landscapes, is a classic. Seen so many times, you’d think it could no longer surprise you. So I sat there, familiar with every note, every cut, and then, from one moment to the next, it hit me. Completely unprepared. That inner emotional force that arrives without warning, that simply is.
I know this feeling. It happened to me last year at the Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle. That sudden, overwhelming moment when beauty simply knocks you flat. But the reasons were different this time. In Seattle, it was pure visual intensity, light and glass and color, that swept me away. Last night at Fotografiska, it was something deeper. Something to do with time.
I realised that Anton Corbijn’s work has been with me for decades. Since his earliest work with Depeche Mode. Since I was young, absorbing music and images without knowing that I was learning how I would perceive the world. Anton’s aesthetic has flowed into me without my noticing. His images trained my eyes. His videos shaped the way I hear music. Not just with my ears, but with my whole body.
That is not an exaggeration. It is simply true.
And in that darkened room, on that bench, with “Enjoy the Silence” on the wall, all of it became clear to me at once. The long arc. The decades. The quiet, invisible traces that other people leave in us. Often without knowing it, often without our noticing, until a moment like this one forces us to stop.
His black-and-white photographs are black and white. On paper, in the frame, in technique. That is true. But looking at them unfolds an immensely colorful emotional world inside me. That may sound like gushing. I know. I am writing it anyway, because it is exactly right. Every single photograph. This capacity to generate abundance from reduction, volume from silence, and an entire inner landscape from two colors. That is what strikes me, again and again. What struck me last night.
I am not a photographer. I will never shoot photographs like that. I cannot assess the craft dimension of his work. But I know what his images do to me. And I believe that is, ultimately, what art is about. Not only the skill, but what comes alive in the person standing in front of it. What is awakened. What is remembered.
I left the exhibition and walked back down the same staircase. The same railing, the same cold, the same graffiti. But I was not the same person who had walked up.
This exhibition moved me. On so many levels at once that even now, a day later, I am still sorting out what actually happened.
I feel gifted.
That is the right word. Not impressed, not informed, not entertained. Gifted. By an evening I had planned, that nonetheless caught me completely by surprise. By images I thought I knew, that struck me anew. By an artist whose work has accompanied my life longer than I had realized.
Thank you, Anton.
Edited with the help of Grammarly.
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