Written in the West

Wim Wenders' 1987 conversation with Alain Bergala about photography,
the landscape of the American West and the memory for colors.

English translation by Michael Hulse.
Copyright 2000 by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag Munich.

A.B. These photographs were all taken with a 5 x 6-inch medium format camera. Did you choose that camera because you had a purely photographic project in mind?

W.W. No, not at all. I've been taking medium format photos for a good ten years. I had a Pentax 6 x 9 but it was stolen some time before I took this series. They were started when I returned from Japan in 1983. I'd made a documentary film there, Tokyo-Ga, and on the last day I bought the camera. I had wanted it for a long time - a Makina-Plaubel, with a lens I think highly of, the 90mm, which is the equivalent of the 45mm small format in photography, or in film. To my way of thinking, it's the lens that comes closest to the human eye without distorting. For cinema purposes I don't like it - in my opinion, the field of vision ought to be greater at the sides. I very rarely use this focal length for film work, only occasionally for close-ups of people. On the other hand, I'm very fond of it for photography, especially for medium format shots, because I like the relation of height to width, which reminds me a little of the classic format of very early cinema productions. I always dreamed of owning this camera: it's lightweight and not particularly big, very nearly ideal in my view. When I came back from Tokyo with it, I started traveling crisscross all over the American West, for two or three months, as part of the preparation for Paris, Texas. I didn't go looking for material with the Makina, I used my Leica, loaded with slide film, because it's more convenient and practical for production purposes. Using,the Makina and Eastman negative film was purely for my own pleasure. It was another way of preparing for the film, too, a different kind of research that had less to do with locations than with the light in the West. I had never made a film in that landscape and was hoping that taking photographs would sharpen my understanding of the light and landscape, my sense of empathy with it. So although these photos were taken in connection with the film we made in that part of the country, they are quite independent of it, despite the fact that a lot of the photos were taken in places such as Houston, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona or California where we did in fact shoot the film. But these large-format photos were my own personal, private way of preparing for the film.

A.B. Were you already thinking of exhibiting the photographs or publishing them in book form?

W.W. No, not at the time. Usually I only print contacts of my photos - very rarely large prints. But when I saw the first proof prints that were done in Los Angeles from my Makina negatives, I was very surprised, and happy with the results I could get with the camera. When I was travelling around those three months, mostly on my own, I saw these pictures as a kind of secret treasure hoard. So two years later, when the people at the Centre Pompidou asked me to put together an exhibition, these negatives were the only ones I could even consider.

A. B. The first time I saw these photos taken on your travels I was taken totally by surprise to see how completely you had eliminated from them everything that might relate to yourself. Quite unlike Robert Frank or Lee Friedldnder, you have got rid of yourself as travelling individual entirely. You just look at the landscape. But a strong impression of solitude remains.

W.W. Solitude and taking photographs are connected in an important way. If you aren't alone, you can never acquire this way of seeing, this complete immersion in what you see, no longer needing to interpret, just looking. There's a distinct kind of satisfaction that you get from looking and travelling alone, and it's connected with this relation of solitude to photography. If you're not alone you take different photos. I rarely feel the urge to take pictures if I'm not on my own. That trip looking for material was sheer pleasure. I'd get up in the morning and drive off into the blue and just keep driving all day. For long distances I didn't even have any music to listen to. There was nothing I needed but to look and take photographs. The combination was unusual anyway, those two beautiful cameras, the Leica and the Makina, with their different functions. Really there were the three of us on that trip. A few of the pictures were taken later, after the filming of Paris, Texas, during the editing. I was still missing a few inserts, mostly motel signs, so in March 1984 1 went back with my assistant, Claire, and a camera assistant, to shoot some of the takes again. I'd almost say you could see the difference between the photos I took when I wasn't alone and the others. They don't radiate the same concentration or happiness.
Yes, when you take photographs, solitude is often tied up with a particular feeling of happiness, a quite specific kind of contentment that I've occasionally noticed in other people I've met taking photos on their travels too. Usually they're fairly quiet people, not as het-up or agitated as other travellers.

A.B. The Leica photos were taken with a wide-angle and are quite different in character.

W.W. I had a 28mm lens on the Leica, the same lens as we used for the film. Eighty percent of the takes in Paris, Texas were shot with a 28mm. But a 28mm lens distorts more when you use it for photography than it does if you're making a film.

A.B. How did you decide when to use the Leica or the Makina when the three of you were travelling? What did the decision depend on?

W. W. The Leica was there to search for material, the Makina was pleasure. With the Leica I had the feeling that I was involved with the landscape or things in a work situation, and at times even felt I was exploiting them. On a few occasions when I was taking work photos with the Leica, I told myself that I owed the place in question an altogether different kind of respect and that I ought to take another photo with the Makina. And when I'd taken it my relation with the place would have changed. I wasn't a film director looking for locations any more, I was myself, me: I'd finally arrived at the place, and felt calm again.

A.B. When you were working on the montage of Paris, Texas you told an interviewer that you felt you couldn't film a place if you hadn't previously been there a time or two, and you said how appalling it was to approach things with the eye of the tourist. But doesn't photography - rather than film - permit one to register something one's seeing for the first time?

'W. W. Certainly. Photography enables you to grasp a place first time round. In fact, photography often tends to become impossible in a place you're already familiar w'th. Going back somewhere seldom accompanies a desire to take photos. For me, the familiarity of things, knowing them, almost rules out photography. It is a means of exploration, it's a vital part of travel, almost as essential as a car or a plane. The photo camera makes arrival in a place possible.

A. B. Above all to stop the car and take time for things, to let them work on you?

W.W. Yes. Given the distances you have to cover in the American West, stopping the car isn't something you take for granted. But the camera provided me with a reason, an urgent need, to stop. I don't take photos out of the window.

A.B. How was it - stopping, deciding to take a photograph, figuring out the composition of the shot?

W. W. When I take photographs I often feel a short while beforehand that the photo is going to happen. You arrive someplace and stop and you're kind of excited even before you've located the actual motif. You can sense a place even before you're there, that particular light, an atmosphere. My photos often begin on a particular "surface" of a landscape, town or street. The surface structure is apparent to the eye even before the actual shot location has finally been found. For example, I was once in a small town in New Mexico called Las Vegas, just like the famous Las Vegas in Nevada, and I took the photo of an empty store in blue and red. It's one of my favourites (plate 3 I). When I set out, I sensed beforehand that I would find that building. And when I arrived in that god-forsaken town, in that afternoon light, with the streets deserted and the housefronts weather-beaten, I knew I would stay, that I had to find a hotel, because I wouldn't be able to get free of the place so fast. The town itself wasn't right for the film because it was too far off the beaten track, but I'd driven there anyway because I just had to see this other Las Vegas. Names and writing ... in the West there are a lot of signboards, cinema facades, billboards half worn away by the elements, already falling apart. For me, photography and weathered surfaces like that are often connected. For the film, too, I often took locations because I knew they were disappearing. In The American Friend, for instance, we shot one scene in front of a facade because we'd read in the paper that the whole block was scheduled for demolition.

W.W. Behind the photos is a wish to look at something (regarder) and to preserve it (garder). The French word gets it nicely: re-garder. The photos Walker Evans took in the Depression were just that: preserving something that was going to disappear in three or four years' time, in your eye and in your memory.

A. B. That's exactly the feeling you get from the photos Atget took of certain street corners and shops in Paris ...

W. W. I think that was the whole ethical meani'ng of what he was doing. He saw himself as a conservationist. I value this aspect of photography as preservation very highly.

A. B. It gives this photo series as a whole an end of the world flavour, the small towns in particular, the street corners, the stores ... It's as if you'd taken them right after the end of the world. One doesn't have that feeling with Paris, Texas; and the film evolves the notion of a new beginning. When you were travelling, looking for material, was there a sense in which melancholy went hand in hand with your photographic work?

W. W. This is an integral part of the American West. We shall have to talk about this in more detail. But photography does have spiritual links with the "end of the world", more than film. Nicholas Ray once told me the advice he gave actors he was training. He'd. say: "Even if you're only asking for a light, even if you're only saying good day, you have to do it as if you thought it could be the last time." That idea impressed me. The way I see it, it's a vital part of photography, seeing something and recording it as if it were the last possible chance to do so. To my mind, that's the "end of the world" side of photography. But there's a converse, too, which is that then a photo exists, which perpetuates the existence of the world.

A. B. Do you have the same sense of preserving things by looking at them (re-garder) when you shoot a film take?

W. W. I think that films narrate history. Films especially.
All films are ultimately documentaries, because in passing, unintentionally, they record the clouds crossing the sky or a flock of birds somewhere in the background or someone walking by who doesn't notice he's being filmed. Or else animals: I'm always very affected when I see animals in a film. They are simply there, even more innocent than children, and they have no idea whatsoever that there are such things as cameras. But if you're making a film and you shoot the same scene ten times, the fact that the clouds cross the sky ten times devalues every one of those takes seen for itself just as much as the fact that it's been endlessly rehearsed does, or that it can be cut at any point during the editing. If you film landscape, the shots very often aren't in the final film and the negative will be destroyed. So film making is not as definitive an act as photography.

A. B. There are directors, such as Rohmer in some of his films, who take this idea to its logical conclusion. If every shot is unique, and if, given the sacrosanct value of each moment in the filming, there can be no progression from one take to another, then the response is to shoot any given take only once.

WW. I know. That impresses me greatly. I think Kurosawa films like that too. The editing and selection process really are pretty cruel: It's very unjust to take 200 hours of film material that record people, landscapes, the sky, animals or objects, and throw out 198 in order to keep two.