Wim Wenders | Time Capsules, by the Side of the Road. Wim Wender's Recent Photographs
In September Mr Wenders met with The Economist at the Blain Southern Gallery to talk about his career as a filmmaker, his fascination with photography and his desire to tell stories through images of landscapes. His answers to our questions have been condensed and edited. A full audio recording of the exchange can be found below.
Wim Wenders: I had a camera when I was six. I had a darkroom when I was ten or 12. I’ve always taken pictures but I never took it seriously until the early 1980s, when I went on a journey that was strictly photographic. That also became my first exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ever since, [photography has] become more like the second half of my life. I do my movies, and the other half of my life I travel in order to photograph. I can only do the one or the other.
As a kid I only wanted to become a painter. Photography and film-making was completely out of the question in post-war Germany. (You could just as well become an astronaut than a film director.) So I went to Paris to become a painter. I got side-tracked by the fact that some painters I liked started to work with film cameras, like Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and [Stan] Brakhage. I started to make my first film—a completely non-narrative film—as a painter, and then slowly realised that film-making was storytelling. I slowly became more and more of a storyteller and less and less of a painter until I embraced film-making as the only profession that really included everything I liked. It was photography and architecture, music and writing and acting—everything I liked together into one package that was called “film-making”.
I am not a landscape photographer. I am interested in people. I am interested in our civilisation. I am interested in what traces we leave in landscapes, in cities and places. But I wait until people have gone, until they are out of the shot. So the place can start talking about us. Places are so much more able to evoke people when people are out. As soon as there is one person in the shot everybody looks at that person. If there is nobody in the shot, the beholder is able to listen to the story of that place. And that’s my job. I try to make places tell their stories about us. So I am not a landscape photographer. I am really interested in people, but my way of finding out things about people is that I do photos about their absence, about their traces.
[He considers a photograph of the Elbe near a small East German city called Dömitz, pictured above.] It’s a very lovely, almost romantic river flowing through the fields. That river was the border between the two Germanys. I made a film [“Kings of the Road”, 1976] along that border, [when] the other [Eastern] side was like the other side of the moon. So finally, 30 years later, I could look at the river from the other side.....
Blain|Southern Berlin is delighted to present new and recent photographs by Wim Wenders, the artist’s first exhibition in his hometown in over half a decade. The exhibition brings together images of Germany and America – the two countries that have most influenced the artist throughout his career.
The title, Time Capsules. By the side of the road, alludes to the relationship between memory and photography, highlighting the ability of photographs to act as a medium that captures an essence of the past and preserves it for the future. Several of the works in the exhibition feature places that have long-since changed, the images themselves therefore becoming portals into lost moments or spaces. Wenders speaks of how: “I see myself as an interpreter, as a translator, a guardian […] of stories that places tell me.”
The exhibition fosters a dialogue between the two countries in which Wenders has spent extensive periods of time living and working: “I think I had wide-open eyes for America, and ‘the American landscape’ in a general sense seemed extremely attractive to me, both as a photographer and filmmaker. Maybe the long absence from Germany of 15 years has enabled me to see places here with the same wide-open eyes. What has remained the same: in those landscapes, German or American, I’m still looking for the traces of civilization, of history, or people.”