A. B. That's why the rushes (the unedited raw material) make
the best film, in a sense?
W. W. They're always the best film. They are the only way of
seeing the film in its entire innocence. I always look at my rushes
without the sound first. For one thing, I can never wait till
the sound has been added. For another, what interests me at that
point is not so much the dialogue, since I still know pretty exactly
what the actors said. Looking at rushes without the sound is like
the infancy of cinema, like silent movies. There are only the
pictures. For pictures, silent screenings are the moment of truth.
Compared with film, there is something final about photography.
I rarely took a larger number of photos of the same place using
the medium-format camera. With the Leica it was different: often
I would shoot whole series of shots of the same thing as I went
around. But with the bigger camera you walk up and down, you look
at your subject from every angle, and then you take up the position
you've chosen. Usually, with the large-format negatives, there's
just one picture of any one place.
A. B. How is the image fixed using this camera?
W.W. Through the viewfinder. The Makina, like the Leica, is not
a single lens reflex camera. It doesn't have a focusing screen.
A. B. Did a landscape ever tempt you to mount the camera on
a tripod, as a painter would use an easel?
W. W. All of these photos were taken hand-held. The
camera's amazing: not too heavy, fairly flat, easy to carry you
simply open it up and pull out the lens. And it fits the hand
well. I do sometimes use a tripod for photographs, especially
when I'm using another camera for panoramic shots. And I did have
a tripod in the car on this trip, only I never used it. If I took
a shot in the evening, when the light was going, using a long
exposure, I would put the camera on the car, or a wall or fence.
A.B. The look of these photos is so stable and constructed
that one has the impression they were taken using a tripod.
W. W. When I take photographs, it usually feels unnatural
to mount the camera on a tripod. If I'm not holding the camera
when I release, the whole thing tends to feel too abstract, and
it's as if the camera were some autonomous thing. It reminds me
of road surveyors. If you use a cable release on top of that,
the camera becomes so independent, to my way of thinking, that
I can no longer call the way the shot is seen 11 mine". The
whole experience of seeing, the experience of the image, becomes
stiff and artificial.
A. B. The idea of houses and signs falling apart, this "end
of the world" theme, is about people and the things they
construct. But where are the trees, the landscapes, nature itself,
in relation to your idea of what you want to preserve in photographs
- things in the process of disappearing?
W. W. Only a very few of these pictures have no trace of people.
In most of them there is something or other that will no longer
be there one day, something that may already have disappeared
as we talk. Or in ten years, or a hundred. Take Houston: everything
is so new, so very artificial. The buildings are like toys, like
a Lego city, as if the architecture were a game. Inevitably you
feel that it can't last. For me, the American West is the place
where things fall apart. When I was a boy, I got to know it via
films, Westerns, and adventure stories by the German writer Karl
May. Whenever I imagined the West, I saw incredible country that
had only just been conquered, in a fairly recent past, the "
19th century". When I went there, I thought that because
I had been present when the West was won, so to speak, civilization
must be established there. But it isn't at all: civilization simply
passed through, first a century ago by rail, then in our own century
by car when the freeways, gas stations and motels were built in
the Twenties and Thirties. Now the whole of that road culture,
complete with the advertising and the neon, is out of date. No
one needs it any more. People don't drive from New York to Los
Angeles. They haven't been taking the train for twenty years either.
The Americans mainly live along the coasts or in the Midwest,
the vast agricultural heartland. But they simply passed through
the West. They did try to start things up, they built roads, motels
and gas stations and put up a lot of signs, and even thought of
building towns. And sometimes in the middle of the desert you
come across a road sign reading: 375 Street. But nothing worked
out. So nowadays there are only trucks roaring by and an occasional
car. Civilization came, stopped for a short while, and moved on,
and now it's in the process of vanishing again. Only a few people
stayed, and they're moving away now, leaving the gas stations
and the unneeded cars rusting away everywhere. The decay goes
rapidly in the heat, sun and rain: an abandoned gas station will
be totally overgrown in a year. If you look at these photos, you
might think I'd tried deliberately to keep people or other living
creatures out of them, but in fact I always waited in case anyone
came by. What you see ultimately is that the asphalt, cars and
neon ads have hardly made any impression on the landscape, though
the neon does fit very well with the colours and evening light
of the West. You have the feeling that in another hundred years
there will be nothing of all this left at all. The country will
reassert itself It's already next to impossible to take a train
through the West, and it's conceivable that in twenty years you
won't be able to cross by car either. You'll have to take the
plane. So right there in that mythic landscape of the West I kept
on finding that surface structure that exerts a magical attraction
on photography, as it were: decay.
A. B. Doesn't that imply that the landscapes in your photos
show the final state after the end of the world, and that the
couple in the last photo are the sole survivors?
W. W. If you like. Especially once you know that the place where
they live is called the Devil's Graveyard. It's hard to get there.
It takes a good hour in a landrover. The two of them live on their
own out there. It's the country where Paris, Texas opens, when
Travis arrives from Mexico. A lot of the wetbacks - illegal Mexican
immigrants - enter the US through that desert. It certainly is
the end of the world, or that final state after it.
A. B. You say there are so few people in the photos because
there were so few there. But even in the city shots one senses
shyness in you, or a fear of taking pictures of people - as if
you didn't want to subject them to an assault.
W. W. Yes, I do have problems with that. You don't have the right
to photograph someone who objects or at any rate knows nothing
about it. I do not like the telephoto lens, which enables you
to bring people up close without their realising you're doing
it. I asked the old man in front of the motel if he minded being
photographed, and the couple in the last photo posed for it.
A. B. Have you ever taken someone's photograph and not dared
ask permission?
W. W. Yes, often. Afterwards I'm angry at myself for not having
had the courage. If you ask and people refuse, there is nothing
to feel sorry about, that's just how it is. But it isn't so easy
to walk up to someone and say, "I'd like to take your picture."
In fact, if I think of films, where you're always dealing with
a lot of people, actors and extras, I'm actually pleased that
photos touch upon other areas: mainly landscapes, buildings, trees,
other things, and people too, but from a distance. In a film,
landscape is normally only the background for figures; photography
establishes a just balance, as it were. Primarily because landscape
in films, even as background, is being increasingly sidelined.
It's fallen victim to the television idiom, which is steadily
invading cinema: the prevalence of close-ups against an unfocused
background. Television has eliminated complete overviews because
you have to look more carefully and things don't immediately strike
you. Nowadays it has become rare to see action from a distance,
in a landscape context, in cinema films. In photos, on the other
hand, long shots are a real pleasure, particularly in medium format.
With that resolution and depth definition, you can make out even
the smallest details, such as the cigarette butts in the street
in the picture of the Safeway supermarket (plate 39).
In film you can never achieve that resolution. The picture quality
of 35mm film, and the size of the screen, impose limits. These
days in cinema you rarely see a 35mm picture as it could be. In
ninety percent of cases you see the texture of the screen, the
film may not be absolutely in focus, there may not be enough light
hitting the screen, or the light from the projector may have a
slight element of blue or red. What makes photography so enjoyable
is that the quality of the prints is up to you. No one can change
anything. People will see them exactly as you produce them.
A. B. When I saw Paris, Texas in Cannes I thought it must
have been filmed with a big, heavy camera, say a Panavision. But
you told me it was shot with a small Arri B. L.
W.W. You may have thought that because in Paris, Texas there
are even more overview shots than in any of my other films. That
is what gives the film its "weight", not a heavy camera.
And anyway, a Panavision doesn't shoot better pictures than an
Arriflex. On the contrary, in my opinion there are no better lenses
than the Zeiss lenses developed for the Arri. And the film in
a heavy studio camera is the same 35mm format as in a hand-held
camera. Ideally I would film using a 70mm camera. The 70mm films
you can see in a few major cinemas at present were all filmed
on 35mm and blown up to 70mm. But films actually shot on 70mm,
as in the 50s and 60s, are already legends.
A. B. Does your fondness for inscriptions, lettering and signs
come from your great love of Walker Evans's photos?
W.W. Yes, I'm sure it does. There aren't many people in these
photos, but there are a lot of signs and lettering. In a way,
they are a substitute for people in this landscape. The omnipresence
of signs and advertisements is typical of the American West. People
weren't able to establish proper settlements, but it seemed to
me that they had painted big signs everywhere so that they wouldn't
feel so isolated and to prove that they had really conquered the
country. It's like getting to the North Pole or the top of Mount
Everest and finding a dozen flags planted by those who have been
there before, to prove the fact that they've been there. In the
US, the culture of lettered monuments is overwhelming and fairly
advanced. It involves a lot of imagination, originality, care,
and detailed work on shadows and outlines. The pains that are
taken and the sheer love of lettering that are apparent in neon
writing or ads are extraordinary, and the result often has a real
beauty.
A.B. In this respect Europe makes an impoverished impression.
Here we get our writing between the covers of books and not out
in the street.
W.W. There aren't as many books in the US, but there are n,iore
things up for sale. The things they write in neon lights or paint
up on hoarding lettering are amazing. The mere name of a snack
bar owner or baker can often seem fantastic. 'We don't have that
enthusiasm for signs and lettering. I like that American signs
and letters culture a lot, that childlike pleasure people take
in all the different ways something can be written.
A.B. The writing heightens that end of the world feeling.
It's as if the people were gone and only their signs remained,
though already falling apart. We can't see the people any more
but we can see the traces they left.
W.W. The Americans say, "A man must build a house."
And they really do. They build like crazy. The houses may not
last long, but they're there. But in America you often have the
feeling that a man will paint a big sign first of all, and then
the sign often counts for more than the building. The house may
be crooked but the sign is superb. I find it touching when you
see writing left in the middle of the country, a message in the
midst of emptiness. In the Californian desert I came upon a huge
vacant plot with nothing on it but a sign reading, Western World
Development. They were obviously trying to sell the land, but
no one was buying. The sign has been there for ten years, it will
still be there in ten years' time, and sooner or later the wind
will blow it down. In five hundred years an archaeologist will
find it and try to decipher it.
A. B. One senses a great reticence in your pictures towards
the subjects you want to photograph, and at the same time, perhaps
even more than in your films, there is a tremendous urge for technical
perfection: perfection of view, lines, colours. That is to say,
you are entirely dedicated to the things you see, but you won't
abandon your own power to determine the picture's formal and aesthetic
qualities. How do you reconcile the two positions?
W. W. For me they coexist quite simply. The one is inconceivable
without the other. I think dedication to things means nothing
and leads to nothing, and is neither satisfying nor enriching,
if it is not accompanied by a form that will articulate it - that
is, if I have no frame within which I can lose myself, or if there
is no centre or no balance between the horizon and the landscape,
or if I cannot see how the lines harmonize, or if the colours
do not correspond to an emotion. If either component is absent
- the dedication or the form that counterbalances it - then you
become just a tourist, the whole exercise means nothing, and the
picture remains empty.
A. B. Your wish to prove your originality as a photographer
to yourself is clearly apparent in these photos. One senses a
great awe before the act of photography, and also the high standards
you set yourself. You aren't trying to establish your own profile
as a photographer; instead, what we see has a distinct classicism.
The considerable value you place on form has nothing to do with
the photographer's vanity. You do everything you can to make the
photos as good as possible, but you don't impose your own personality
on them.
W. W. I believe the photographer's attitude decides what
the photograph will be like. All great photos are free of arrogance.
There are arrogant photographers who take very good pictures,
because they have acquired artistic skills, but in photos like
that you usually miss the life. What you see instead is a reflection
of the photographer himself. The photos that really mean something
to me are those where the photographer has abandoned his own identity.
My favourite photographers are all a little like the camera directors
I know in cinema. They don't see themselves as artists either,
at all. American cameramen in particular see themselves as craftsmen.
Craftsmen who use light. The photographers I think highly of are
people who want to forget themselves. Perhaps that wish for self-effacement
is a sign of reverence or modesty. Some photographers really are
reverent people. Robert Frank is one of the most modest people
I know, and he takes wonderful pictures.
A. B. It strikes me that in photography you are not so much
concerned with style. In film work, on the other hand, you wonder
quite systematically: what will the style of this film look like?
Or: what style would suit the film? What counts for you in photography
is only that each picture be perfect, not that you locate a personal
style over and above all of the pictures.
W. W. Exactly. And that's what makes photography so
relaxing: every picture is unique, a universe of its own. If you
put together an exhibition or a book, you promptly have problems
of sequence, context, montage - in other words, questions of style.
But all of that comes after. When you are actually taking the
photographs, every picture evolves a style of its own, and there
is no reason why you should necessarily refer to the previous
photo when you take the next shot two minutes or two hours or
two days later. In film, on the other hand, every shot is subject
to rules, because another shot precedes it and another follows
it and the whole film aims to establish its own fluidity, a continuous
idiom.
A. B. When you see all these photos assembled for exhibition
now, can you see anything in them that bears a likeness to you
and of which you were unaware when you took the individual pictures?
W.W. Yes. When we made the prints we all looked at them very
closely, worked on them and corrected them, and it was only then
that I saw to my astonishment that every photo had its centre.
It was something I hadn't been aware of before - that I always
try to concentrate on the midpoint. Everything of any importance
is always in the middle of the picture - which is neither necessary
nor in any sense inevitably so.
A. B. You are like Godard in that respect. He says that for
him choosing the visual section has now become more a question
of sighting, of aligning things with the visual axis, than of
framing.
W. W. I am not sure if that is as true of photography as it is
of film, where everything that isn't in a particular frame is
nevertheless latently present: it might become visible in the
next cut or a pan. In photography, everything outside the perimeters
is excluded for ever. Things that border immediately on the subject
no longer exist and cannot be brought back to life. That may be
the reason why you have to try to find a centre. It's like looking
outside through a window without being able to go any closer to
the window frame: all you see is the section cropped and shown
in the window. Myself, I've never really felt that a movie was
a window of that kind. In a film, the frame is variable. You tend
to structure what you see. Godard is right that framing is less
important in film work than establishing the inner structure of
the image.
A. B. I notice that unlike other photographers you have no
objection to modifying the picture perimeters at print stage.
In other words, in your view there is no reason why the process
of composition should not continue even after the photograph has
been taken. No negative fetishism for you.
W.W. No, not at all. Since you do have the negative to work with,
I see no reason why you shouldn't continue the search for form
at print stage. In fact, I consider it essential that you feel
a need to concentrate, to focus on the centre once again, when
looking at the photos. I have taken a great many Polaroids, and
it's totally different, precisely because you know there is no
negative.
A.B. Bearing the comparison with Polaroids in mind, how do
you respond to the fact that with photography you have to wait
so long before you can see the shot you've just taken? Is it more
frustration or pleasure?
W. W. More pleasure. There were periods when I only took Polaroids,
but it's almost a different attitude to life, a different approach.
Polaroids belong in a different context of experience. There are
always straight alternatives. At times I was tempted by a friend's
Polaroid camera that did very large format pictures. But when
I watched him at work it alarmed me: every photograph called for
such an amount of preparation, and he always used a tripod. I
don't want to stare for hours at a landscape, building or tree,
looking, adjusting, looking, adjusting again, and finally taking
the picture. That kind of work strongly resembles a painter's
in terms of the amount of looking it requires. Setting up for
a whole hour in order to photograph a landscape or object doesn't
really interest me. I'd sooner paint a watercolour. Or else just
look for an hour without taking a photograph, so that a photograph
remains in the mind, without material form, an impression I can
find in my memory.
A. B. But aren't you sometimes afraid of overdoing the composition?
Aren't you afraid that lines, colours and other compositional
qualities might be foregrounded at the expense of the actual subjects?
W.W. That's a problem that arises with every new photo you take,
and you can't discuss it in general terms. A highly structured
photograph can do perfect justice to the subject, or a picture
that places less emphasis on composition may alternatively obscure
the subject. There's no rule. The section you fix for viewing
constitutes a new structure every time, and the rules it establishes
for what it frames are also new every time. And it stays that
way even when you enlarge: suddenly you realise that a tiny adjustment,
a minimal shift in the frame, has made the picture too much a
thing of beauty for there to be anything actually to see in it.
At times when you're taking photographs you realise that you're
hooked on composition and you're no longer really aware of what
it is you're seeing. Composition can quickly become narcissistic:
you fancy yourself as an artist. The pictures you take in that
frame of mind are often completely empty, precisely because they're
too perfect. Composition is not only a problem every time you
take or enlarge a photo, it's also a product of your attitude
as you look at something and the mood you are in. Some days, the
section of the composition really is a window you see the world
through. That is to say, you need the frame - as if you were in
a cell - in order to look at the landscape as someone would who
has not seen daylight for a long time and then finds a window
and wants to do nothing but look. On the other hand, some days
you can be standing in the country looking through the window
frame into the cell, as it were. With a camera you can be inside
or outside the window. Sometimes the frame opens out, sometimes
it closes. It all depends on your attitude within yourself. And
that can change from one day to the next, or even within a single
day.
A. B. And does that attitude entirely depend on you, or does
it depend what comes your way?
W.W. The two things affect each other. At times I only register
things when the frame makes them visible. At other times, when
I'm framing a composition the things vanish from my sight, or
they're destroyed. Photography is always an immediate translation
of an existential state, of happiness, loneliness or boredom.
Sometimes you're bored because you're taking photographs, sometimes
you feel bored till at last you can take photos and you revive.
At times it's as if you were dead till the moment you see something
in the viewfinder. At other times you feel very alive, and you
frame something in a photograph, only to have it die on you, like
picked flowers.
A.B. One senses from your photos that you like confronting
subjects fiill face. The manmade foreground often feels like a
stage set...
W. W. That impression is basic to the American West. Everything
people have built there has a highly theatrical air. Once you're
in country as open as that, a frontal view becomes more or less
the only option, because any other way of looking at things -
say, from a particular angle, from the side or above or below
- ends up isolating the subject from its surroundings. Viewed
frontally, things retain their identities, whereas if they're
seen at special angles they tend to lose them. And any angle other
than a full face one is a reminder of the photographer's subjective
presence.
A. B. Is that frontal view also a way of conferring a kind
of sacred aura on the things you photograph, removing them from
the current of time, from anecdote?
W.W. Yes. The things themselves have no sense of time. I bring
that with me, ultimately by arriving on the spot and then driving
on. A full face view of things, of buildings and landscapes, is
the one that most excludes my own subjective presence, yet at
the same time I am one with what is in front of me to the utmost
possible degree.
In the American West, the horizon is invariably present. It dominates
every picture. Do what you like, the horizon is there, cutting
the photo in two, and the spatial qualities of everything in the
picture are related to the horizon because that is where the perspective
leads. If the point of view isn't frontal but angled, the subject
is divorced from the horizon, and that hurts the eyes. And the
things themselves.
A. B. In regard to theatricality, I was particularly impressed
by two photos of Los Angeles (plates 47, 48). First you construct
a theatre, with the trompe-l'oeil windows and the little curtains.
Then against that backdrop something real happens - a man who
has just been arrested is taken to an open police car - but under
your gaze that real scene itself becomes theatre. It's like a
reward: you photograph the city as if it were a theatre, and promptly
something very dramatic happens. But wonderful little chance events
like that have to be earned. How exactly did it happen?
W. W. I was walking around downtown Los Angeles, and all of a
sudden down this dead end I saw the painted wall with its make-believe
windows and dainty awning. I went down and tried to find somewhere
that I could get everything on, the theatre set and the cars in
front. It was a bit like back projection in a film, as if real
cars had been put in front of a photo of a street. It took me
a long time to find the kind of position I had in mind because
there wasn't much room. I backed into an entry to get everything
in. That was the first photo. Then I noticed that there was a
police car ten metres along and they were just taking someone
along who had been caught shoplifting. The cops had the guy between
them in handcuffs. So there I still was looking at the back projection
screen, and now I had my actors. So I rushed out behind them in
that short quiet moment when one of the cops had opened the car
door for the thief to get in, it all went very quickly, I hardly
had time to look through the viewfinder and left the aperture
as it was, estimated the distance, and then just took the shot.
A. B. You were in the position of a reporter, but basically
the photograph radiates the selfsame calm and composure as all
the others.
W. W. That's because the previous photo was still in my mind.
It was really as if the actors were simply rehearsing. And then
there was that remarkable moment when all three of them were standing
waiting by the car like actors waiting for the director to shout
"Action". They didn't notice me, and I went off grinning,
with that sly feeling of having bagged one of those moments -
a snapshot.
A.B. Would you have taken the picture if you hadn't taken
the one before?
W. W. On no account. That's a photoreportage genre that other
photographers have specialized in, but I practically never do
it. I took the photo because it had that context of "rehearsing
a scene against a back projection screen".
A. B. How do you define the relation between the compositional
section chosen for a picture and the colours?
W. W. The problem of the relation is a fairly new one for me,
because I used to take black and white shots almost always, for
most of the thirty years I've been taking photographs. To me,
the problem of the frame is essentially a problem of black and
white photography. These pictures taken with this camera were
done because I was planning to make a film in colour. I wanted
it really to be a colour film, and wanted to work out what was
going on (to my eyes), in terms of colour, in that landscape.
In films I'd previously made in colour, the colour effects were
always rather left to chance. You can never completely have colour
as you want it, and colour dramaturgy rapidly produces ghastly
clich6s. Very often, the ideas you have in advance about the colours
in a film quickly begin to look tired. So my only aim in taking
these photos was to improve my own capacity to react to colours,
to become more open to colours, simply to get to know them better.
I took a whole lot of photos purely for the colours, which was
quite a new departure for me. That photo with the the big tree,
for instance (plate 58) - I took it because of the pale green
all around, and the silvery, metallic look of the shadow. Or the
lounge in a little hotel, with the colourful armchairs (plate
16). 1 was passing the hotel and looked in the windows. They were
very dirty because the hotel had been closed down for a long time,
but I saw all these incredible armchairs in all those colours.
I tried to get in but it was all locked up. At last I found an
old man who had the keys. He was very suspicious, and it took
a long time to persuade him to open up for me. I took a lot of
photos. The "surface" that interested me was the colours
of the armchairs, four or five different colours. They were in
a semicircle, which looked slightly theatrical in itself. You
didn't even feel that the characters were missing, because it
was as if the armchairs were talking to each other.
A.B. What did you learn in the process of getting to know
colours better, for the film?
W.W The main thing I learned was not to distrust colours any
more. You sometimes say - especially in the US, where everything
is colourfiil - "That's a bit too daring, putting those colours
together," or, "That's rather over the top." These
photos helped me accept colours the way they were.
A. B. And not to be afraid of them?
WW. Yes. It means the problem of taste no longer arises. That's
the worst thing about colours - especially when you're working
on films, but in life too: the way questions of taste automatically
arise. You've hardly arrived at a hotel and someone's saying,
"I can't stay in this room, I can't stand that shade of green.
" In films it goes even further and you try to establish
a colour dramaturgy. But colours are always linked to personal
taste - the set-designer's, the cameraman's, the director's -
so they're always limited somehow or other. And in the American
West, where no limits are imposed on colour, you just have to
learn to put questions of taste behind you and accept colours.
A. B. When one moves on from one photo to the next, one senses
in your approach to colour that you accept the clash of contradictory
cultural styles. If you've taken one photo, you don't tell yourself
not to take another.
W.W. Exactly. But that was what I had to learn: not to censor,
just to value what was there.
A. B. Do the colours ever surprise you if you compare the
location with the resulting photograph?
W.W. To be honest, I have no memory for colours. I never remember
colours. I noticed that afterwards I was never able to describe
the colours. When I see the photographs, my memory of the actual
colours is erased. It must be connected with the fact that in
my memory and dreams the pictures tend to be black and white.
I have no memory for colours, and with every photo I'm amazed
that the colours are as they are.
---
back
to page 1
