Dutch photographer and movie director Anton Corbijn has won the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize.  

In 2004 The Low Countries Yearbook featured an article on Corbijn. Read it here. 

Pop music

Corbijn (Strijen, 1955) started his career in the early seventies, photographing pop concerts. Many of these photos were published in the Dutch music magazine Oor. In the early eighties he made an international breakthrough, from London, with portrait photos of musicians like Tom Waits (left), Miles Davis (below), David Bowie, Captain Beefheart and the group U2.  

Over the years Corbijn has designed record sleeves, made video clips and taken care of the set design for concerts for a variety of artists and bands ranging from Depeche Mode and Nirvana to Johnny Cash.  

Personalities

In the last twenty years he has photographed a lot of personalities from the film world, art and other disciplines as well, two interesting examples of these being Nelson Mandela and Alexander McQueen. His photographic work can be documentary in style as well as conceptual. Corbijn often commits his work to photo books.

As a director he is well known for his films Control (2007) and The American (2010), which were both reviewed in The Low Countries Yearbook.

The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize carries a cash award of 75,000 euros. In addition the winner gets his own cultural fund with a starting capital of 75,000 euros, the name and aim of which it is up to him to decide.  

The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize will be presented on 28 November 2011 in the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam.