In 1977, a young Anton Corbijn photographed Tom Waits in the Netherlands, black-and-white frames made before either man was widely known. Those negatives open Waits/Corbijn, a Schirmer/Mosel hardcover that follows a collaboration of more than three decades and gathers its results in one volume of 272 pages.

The book’s centre is Corbijn’s portraiture: 145 images of Waits, made across years of sessions in which the photographer’s cinematic instincts and the musician’s theatrical self-image pushed against each other. Corbijn has described photographing the same subject for thirty years as an unusually organic process, playful and serious at once; Waits has spoken of Corbijn’s point of view. The pictures are staged, shadowed and frankly performative rather than documentary. Set against them are the “Curiosities”: photographs Waits took himself, mostly of everyday objects, together with notes and sketches drawn from his archives. Some 226 images in all, the sequence places the crafted portrait beside the incidental observation, so that a reader watches two sensibilities answer each other. Jim Jarmusch and Robert Christgau also appear among the book’s contributors.

The material was first assembled in 2013 as a large-format limited edition that sold out quickly. The 2025 edition is slightly revised and reduced in size, issued without limitation, and puts the whole arc back into circulation. For a collector, that is the argument: the earliest 1977 frames, the long middle of the collaboration, and Waits’s own photographs, which most admirers know only from his records, held together as a single sequence rather than dispersed across decades of magazine and album use.