A black-and-white photo that Anton Corbijn took of Depeche Mode on Prague’s Charles Bridge in November 1988 now draws a queue of tourists every day, almost 38 years later.
They line up at the Pietà sculpture on the 14th-century bridge to copy the pose of Dave Gahan and Martin Gore, the Associated Press reported in early October 2026, and the copies are drawing millions of views on social media.
The concert behind the trip
Depeche Mode first played Czechoslovakia, then a communist state, on 11 March 1988 at the Sportovní hala in Prague, on the Music for the Masses tour. That was 20 months before the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in November 1989.
State television news reported the next day that lorries had brought the band’s equipment that morning and that more than 15,000 people packed the hall that evening, according to the Česká televize archive.
The band came back that November with Corbijn, the Dutch photographer who had been working with them since he directed the video for “A Question of Time” in 1986. He photographed them walking around the city, and the pictures later went into his 1990 book Strangers.
In one frame, Gahan stands beside the Pietà, on the bridge’s south side, and faces the camera while Gore stands with his back to Corbijn, as PetaPixel describes it.
The sculpture shows the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. Emanuel Max designed it in 1858, and it replaced an earlier lamentation group by Jan Brokoff the following year.
From fan meet-up to daily queue
Fans have made the pilgrimage for years. Photos from February 2024, when the band played Prague’s O2 Arena on the 22nd and 24th, appear to have fuelled the current boom, the AP reported.
On 24 February, before the second show, a fan-run “Weekender” led by Filip Macháček called people to Křížovnické náměstí for a group photo shoot on the bridge, Expats.cz reported at the time.
“For me personally, the driving force is the scene itself, the community that has shaped me since the eighties,” Macháček said in a press release.
Pictures of that crowd spread online. The same group had staged a mass fan photo in Old Town Square during the band’s 2023 visit.
“We just saw this on Pinterest or on TikTok, and it’s kind of one of the most famous pictures you can take here in Prague,” Maria Hofer, a visitor from Austria, told the AP. “So, we wanted to do it as well.”
Jorge Sanchez, visiting from California, linked the pose to the band’s songs. “I think it fit at the time, you know, with their music, you know, and their message and their music with your personal Jesus and all of that,” he said.
The clip above is “Never Let Me Down Again,” the second single from Music for the Masses, released on 24 August 1987. Its snare was sampled from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” and Gore’s guitar went through an ARP 2600 synthesizer.
A few statues from St John of Nepomuk
Tourists have long crowded the bridge for another statue. Visitors rub the polished reliefs on the statue of St John of Nepomuk, who was tortured to death on the orders of King Wenceslas IV in 1393 and thrown into the Vltava from the bridge. Touching them is said to bring luck and a return to Prague.
More 80s synth-pop stories, from the Blue Monday sleeve to the “Take On Me” video, are in our artist section.
Corbijn kept working with the band for decades. He has directed more than 20 Depeche Mode videos, the latest being “Before We Drown” in 2024, and has designed most of their sleeves since Violator in 1990.
Lead photo: Sebaso / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0