STATE OF GRACE: AN INTERVIEW WITH WIM WENDERS
Author: Steven Pill
British Journal of Photography
May 17 2011
Wim Wenders started taking photographs aged seven and has pursued his
love of stills ever since as well as directing films. Photography is
a state of mind, he tells Steven Pill.
In one of the opening sequences of the 1974 film, Alice In The
Cities, journalist Philip Winter sits under a boardwalk, laying out
his Polaroids on the sand. Commissioned by his publisher to write
about America, Winter has instead traversed the country photographing
anything and everything with a prototype SX70. Not satisfied with the
results, he shakes his head. “They never really show what it was you
saw,” he says.
The film was co-written and directed by Wim Wenders, the German film
director, playwright, author, photographer and producer behind Paris,
Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). “Philip Winter was my alter
ego,” he says. “He takes pictures because he doesn’t know how to
write about America. And I thought he was quite representative of
the young man I was at the time.”
After a series of student films and rather dry shorts, Alice In
The Cities was a charming and more playful turn for Wenders. And it
is perhaps no coincidence that the breakthrough came after Wenders
explored a subject that was close to his heart – photography.
Thirty-five years later, he returned to the subject of photography
for his last feature, 2009’s Palermo Shooting. Shot in his hometown
of Dusseldorf, the film stars former punk singer Campino as Finn,
a fashion photographer who undertakes large, staged shoots and barks
orders at a coterie of assistants. The contrast in personality with
Winter couldn’t be starker but Finn doesn’t represent a change in
the director’s personal outlook. He’s the antithesis of the director,
who’s now a celebrated photographer in his own right, and his contrary
approach serves as a comment on photography in the digital age.
“Finn is much less me than Philip Winter because Finn is a photographer
[who is] content with photography,” says Wenders. “And as a contented
photographer, he does use digital means to compose his pictures. You
see him at work sometimes and you see that he’s replacing skies and
creating new worlds through different photographs.
The governing notion of photography today is that you produce an image.
“I’m not nostalgic,” adds Wenders firmly. “I just state that it’s
a different approach, and it is much more of a painterly approach,
to photography, and what I cherish about photography has got lost.”
Sure shot
Born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders in 1945, the young Wim Wenders started
taking photographs at the age of seven, shooting animals in the zoo
with a cheap, plastic camera. Photography came naturally to him but he
also learned about image making from his father, who had been given an
early Leica in the 1930s when he graduated from medical school. “That
started a tradition of photography in the family,” says Wenders. “My
father had a darkroom and even as a soldier in the war, he spent his
nights in bathrooms, developing films and enlarging them himself. I
was impressed because they looked like early Ansel Adams. They were
nice prints and then he gave it up altogether and I sensed the regret.
Maybe that’s what made me like it.”
Tribute to Audrey, 2005. Image © Wim Wenders.
Despite his early interest in photography, Wenders opted to study
philosophy and medicine in Germany before moving to Paris as an
apprentice engraver to the artist Johnny Friedlander. The experience
was brief but it proved hugely influential. “I think that the history
of painting really determined my entire sensibility, for photography
as well as filmmaking,” he says. “Vermeer was my biggest hero, then
later on it was definitely Hopper. Max Beckmann too. I think they
all had a very, very distinct sense of place and an enormous feeling
for composition, and my taste for composition comes from paintings,
definitely.”
That strong aesthetic sensibility helped Wenders develop a distinct
style for each of his early films. Working closely with his director
of photography before the shoot, he would settle on a particular
influence that would define the look of each movie. For Kings of
the Road, a film about two melancholic young men travelling across
Germany, he and director of photography Robby Muller turned to an icon
of Depression-era photography. “That film was our Walker Evans look,
and we really went deep into his photography to give the film that
feeling,” says Wenders.
“I remember we did American Friend and had the walls of our room
full of Edward Hopper paintings. But eventually I felt it was not a
great approach any more. I felt it was better to not impose a look
and have it in mind before I started but let the story itself be open
to finding it. It took a while before I had the courage to do that,
especially when I was a young filmmaker. I figured I needed to know
the look before I started and that can be a mistake.”
Even so, Wenders continues to exert a certain amount of control over
the aesthetic of his films. Unusually for a director, he prefers to
frame every shot himself, selecting which lens to use and where to
position the camera, just as he would when taking photographs. “Most
directors of photography I work with are happy this way because they
can concentrate on lighting and operating, and they usually respect
you if you know exactly what shot you want,” he says. “Very often,
the director of photography is the one who chooses the frame and it’s
quite a responsibility if the director doesn’t really give them an
idea of what shot he wants.”
In recent years, professional photographers have started to make
impressive directorial debuts, from Anton Corbijn’s Control to Tom
Ford’s A Single Man. Wenders has been impressed by what he calls these
“cross-over adventurers”, although he believes the transition from
high-end commercial or editorial photography to film directing is
simpler, thanks to the presence of a large crew in both disciplines.
He prefers to work much more simply, often visiting new cities alone
or with his wife, Donata. She’s a published portrait photographer in
her own right, and the couple work separately during their days away,
only commenting on each other’s images back at home in Berlin several
weeks later.
“Taking pictures is a very solitary thing, at least for me,” says
Wenders. “That’s why I wouldn’t even want to have an assistant with
me, because the very presence of somebody else would make that more
important than my relation to the place. And to immerse in a place is
strictly only possible when you are on your own. You can fake it and
you can pretend to want to listen to a place but as soon as there is
someone else there, even if it is just a bystander looking at what you
are doing, it is over. You are no longer in the privileged position
of being a listener.”
Still images
Wenders’ forthcoming exhibition at London’s Haunch of Venison, Places,
Strange and Quiet, collects together 31 photographs taken in cities
across the globe, mostly in the past five years. The earliest image
in the collection dates back to 1983, though, a year he regards as
a turning point in his attitude towards the medium. Throughout the
previous decade, he had been criss-crossing the US, photographing the
local landscape while on the search for film locations. During the
summer of 1983, after shooting had finished on the Palme d’Or-winning
Paris, Texas, he decided to make his first print. “That was the moment
that I thought photography had something to offer in itself,” he says.
“I’d been taking pictures for decades without printing anything;
I was happy with my contact sheets and it just never crossed my mind.
Printing was taking it seriously. Ever since that innocence has gone,
I’ve become a photographer: I take pictures so that I can print them.”
That first professional print led to Written In The West, a book and
touring exhibition that began in 1986 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Several collections followed, often drawn from location scouting
for films such as Buena Vista Social Club and The Million Dollar
Hotel. In the early 1990s, Wenders became increasingly fascinated
with sequential photography and the potential for storytelling through
consecutive stills. His book, Once, contained some of his most personal
photographs to date, accompanied by short, poetic captions and showing
two or more shots of the same filming locations, random encounters
and famous friends.
Today, he is dismissive of the concept explored in the book. “In
photography, the absence of the montage is the most beautiful gift,”
he says. “I know in Once, I was quite preoccupied with the idea and,
every now and then, it is fascinating to see two pictures together.
But if you show two pictures in succession, you start to comment,
and the beauty of a single photograph is that it is enough in itself.”
With that in mind, the 65-year old focused his recent efforts on
increasing the size of his prints, to provide viewers with a more
immersive experience. And after more than 30 years of exploring
America through photography and film, the locations have changed too,
with recent visits taking in Japan, Tel Aviv and Armenia. “Don’t Come
Knocking felt like a goodbye to the West and Land of Plenty even more
so,” he says. “But, that’s only natural if you are so obsessed with
something that you have eventually exhausted it. Other people find
new things about America but I had felt that I had said what I had
to say and there was really nothing to add.”
After spending so much time in the US, he has found it a relief to
visit countries that he had no preconceptions of. Part of the joy of
photography for Wenders is the time spent exploring and acclimatising
to new surroundings, and it took time for him to comprehend and
appreciate Armenia in particular. Landlocked and sandwiched between
Turkey and Azerbaijan, he believes that the small eastern European
republic has maintained its independence thanks to having its own
language and alphabet. “And that’s a strange and beautiful reason for
a country to survive. It has no economic power whatsoever; they don’t
have any oil, nothing. They’ve got apricots. That’s the only export.
There are exiled Armenians all over the world who have sustained
their country and I really got to like these people.”
Documentary aim
Wenders thrives on unfamiliar situations and, while his images
are often atmospheric and highly saturated thanks to his use of
Kodak 160VC film, there is still a strong documentary aspect to his
subjects. “The idea of preservation was always important for me,”
he says. “Even in the movies we use many locations that I went out of
my way to find because I realised they were not going to continue to
exist much longer. That’s a valid reason for photography or for film,
to show something that will vanish, because by taking the picture it
is not vanishing. Something remains, amazingly enough.”
Open Air Screen, Palermo, 2007. Image © Wim Wenders.
Whether in a theme park in Tokyo, a Moscow backyard or a beachfront
in Tel Aviv, Wenders has similar interests. His photographs reveal
a fascination with architectural imperfections, unusual settings
and side-lit street scenes viewed flat. As one might expect from an
experienced feature filmmaker, the mood shifts throughout – abstract
yet familiar, inquisitive yet detached. If figures do appear in
his photographs, they very rarely make contact with the viewer,
often standing with their back to the lens. It is as if Wenders is
seeking solace in these lonely locations, freed from the constraint
of a large film crew.
Achieving this still and contemplative atmosphere takes patience.
Sitting in the buyer’s room of his gallery, surrounded by various
expensive, unsold works of art, Wenders gestures towards one of his
own large-scale panoramas on the far wall. “You have to search a
little bit until you have the frame,” he says. “I very often stand
there for a while, waiting for the light to change and, in this case,
waiting for these little girls to cross. If you stand there, nobody
watches you. If you rush to get the picture, they will look at you but
if you are already standing there, you become part of the landscape.”
Impressively, given the depth in some of his landscape shots, Wenders
works without a tripod to keep things flexible and portable. Despite
making a commercial for the digital Leica M8, he prefers to work
with a 35mm version and on his dedicated photography trips he packs a
medium format Plaubel Makina and a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, which
uses three lenses to produce 6O17 negatives.
“The beauty of the negative is that you still see the failed pictures,
the ones out of focus,” he says. “You can still see how I learnt
to take pictures by looking at my negatives. I like the mystery of
negatives too. If you have a digital camera, no matter how determined
you are, you will check your images and, in a strange way, it breaks
the spell because already you treat it as something finished. There is
something wrong in that. I like the fact that [with negatives] you are
exposing yourself to a place and you don’t know whether you have it.”
Wenders cannot afford to leave things to chance on a multimillion
pound film shoot, so his films are shot entirely in digital. But
what the medium lacks in mystery, it makes up for in scope for
experimentation. Commissioned to produce a film for the 12th Venice
Architecture Biennale, he constructed a prototype 3D filming rig
comprising of two Nikon 5D cameras and produced a 20-minute film
installation about the Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland.
“3D was an adventure in itself, even more remote from photography
than a regular film,” he says. “3D is certainly interesting for
documentaries because you can take people really into the space where
other people live and work and exist, you can really take them there
in a different way. Most of the stuff I’ve seen in the last couple
of years uses 3D as an attraction or a carnival ride, but it is not
necessarily a fantastic tool for telling stories.”
Mental state
Wenders’ forthcoming feature, Pina, was also shot in 3D, but he didn’t
take a single photograph during the shoot. To compensate he intends
to make a photography trip to Africa soon, a continent he briefly
explored when he made a short documentary in Congo for Medicos Sans
Frontières five years ago.
As he gets older, he has found that he can no longer give both
photography and filmmaking his full attention on a single trip,
and he can’t bring himself to pack two cameras as he feels “like two
different people would have to make that journey”.
As if embarrassed by the confession, he leans forward to whisper his
explanation, confiding: “I’ve realised that the photography I like can
only be done purely and it needs a very different approach. Of course,
I can take pictures with my iPhone theoretically, and I do every now
and then, but I’m not a photographer with it – I’m an everyday man.
Photography is a state of mind.” BJP
Haunch of Venison is showing an exhibition of photographs by Wim
Wenders, Places, Strange and Quiet, from 15 April to 21 May. Wenders’
new â~@¨documentary, Pina, will be released in the UK on 22 April.