Anton Corbijn initiated a new era in portrait photography for the rock and pop music scene with his atmospheric, often melancholy images. Here is a photographer who travels the world, tirelessly seeking to capture its idols in quiet moments and catch a trace of their essential being behind all the fame and glamour.

Taken primarily in black and white with a hand-held camera and without auxiliary lighting, most of Corbijn’s photographs are shot in those quiet moments between performances. Beyond the reach of the glaring spotlights, on the dark side of the star cult – literally and metaphorically – Corbijn finds what interests him more than gesture, image, or glamour: the unusual degree of privacy and closeness that turns his portraits into genuine character studies.

Corbijn has now moved beyond the boundaries of music photography and Star Trak reads like a visual encyclopedia of the icons of our culture, gathering together outstanding personalities from the worlds of film, literature, rock music, and fashion. He visits film directors Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and Martin Scorsese, actors Johnny Depp, Gerard Depardieu, and Jodie Foster, and alongside the older rebels – like Mick Jagger and Leonard Cohen – he includes the enfants terribles of the Eighties and Nineties – Kurt Cobain, Billy Idol, and Slash. Corbijn couples the excesses of William S. Burroughs with the beauty of supermodels Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington, and brings Salman Rushdie and Bono together in front of the camera.