This article (from Automatic Baby - u2/REM website:
http://www.geocities.com/automaticbabyremu2website/antoncorbijn.html
Some interesting comments about the band here too
Anton Corbijn bought his first camera when he was 18 and went to an open-air concert to take his first snaps, black and white, and was surprised to find them good enough for publication in a local Dutch music magazine. "I was very shy as a teenager and until I had a camera I didn't even go to concerts on my own. But when I had a camera I felt like I could go to the front of the stage because I had this little excuse in my hand...that's half the reason I got into photography".
Over the years his love of music which got him interested in photography has developed into an obsession with the photography itself.
Within 3 years he had exhausted all the bands he wanted to take pictures of in his home country and in 1979 decided to move to England. He wanted the pictures from the country that was giving the world everything from Joy Division - his favourite band at the time- to Elvis Costello. It was about this time that he took one of his most famous photographs by persuading the camera-shy Joy division to let him work with them. By that autumn Anton had persuaded the NME to let him cover his first concert for them. "I was quite persistent, in fact I was in great demand pretty quickly". Within 6 months Anton was the main man at the music paper and shot about 20 of their cover stories in the next year, from David Bowie and Mick Jagger to Capitain Beefheart and Undertones.
Trough the NME he bumped into a young Irish band called U2.
"I had been asked by a Dutch magazine to take photos of U2 but declined because I thought they were a heavy metal band: 'I thought, No, I'm not going to do U2'".
When the NME made the same request in the spring of '82 he happily compromised.
Bono: "When we met him in 1982, we didn't really understand the paraphernalia of rock'n'roll at all. I think he reacted to some sort of morality play going on in the group. We were going through a stage of wondering whether we even wanted to be in a group and I think he liked that confusion. I hate the word 'image', but he gave us a kind of visual strength we didn't have at that point".
Later that year U2 invited him to Sweden to do "the snow shot" on the inside sleeve of the war album.
In the Winter of '86 the band advanced him some money to research cover shot locations for an album to be titled either Desert Songs or The Two Americas.
"Three days" Anton recalls," Drove to California, filmed all these deserts, flew to LA and showed it them. OK, made a plan. Flew to Nevada and all drove down in a big bus. After the first day's photographing, I said to Bono: 'Listen, I've seen these trees called Joshua trees - I've seen them with Beefheart - and they'd look great on the cover of your album'. Next morning he came down with the Bible and said: 'You're gonna have to photograph this tree! The album's got to be called The Joshua Tree! It's a great idea, Joshua Tree!' So we did it. I tried to take different pictures from their public image but, in the end, those pictures became their public image".
"They became the icons of the group", Bono agrees, "We had to be careful 'cos we'd go out on those photo sessions with Anton and he's very funny and we're very Irish and we'd be, you know, burning down the motel, and in the midst of all this madness there'd be a photograph taken and it would like we were on hunger strike! It's like 'say cheese' in reverse. With Anton it's like 'don't say cheese'. Plus it was freezing and we had to take our coats off so it would at least look like a desert. That's one of the reason we look so grim. But in the late '80s we looked like the group that was too dumb to enjoy being at Number 1 all over the world. So we shifted the focus for Achung Baby".
"We went out to the carnival in Santa Cruz", Anton recalls, "But next morning there's this big meeting. Why are we here? What's the idea? We look stupid standing among all these people. I said: 'Why don't we go along with it? Get masks. Dress up as women. I asked a friend in England to get all the stuff together and she flew out the next morning with the dresses, masks and wigs. We had this great fun!".
Anton Corbijn: "I don't like being known as 'the U2 photographer' because I work with a lot of other people continuously. U2 are very good, but very demanding. Especially Bono because he always wants to create new things but also not to let old things go. Adam is very interesting in the results, Larry is easily bored but easy to take, Edge always looks the same, that's why we've got him jumping on a single sleeve, Bono is quite hard to photograph because he has so many different faces but therefore is my favourite".
Bono: "Anton Corbijn's photographs are very powerful. They are as much photographs of the music as they are of the musicians, and that's why we like them".