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The Frozen Frame lnterview by Richard Pinsent Film director, Wim Wenders, talks to The Art Newspaper about the relationship between his use of the still and the movie cameras. The most recent showing of photographs by the film director Wim Wenders, "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth", at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao last year, drew the second highest daily number of visitors (3,066 -total: 291,268), after Gerhard Richter at MoMA, New York (4,020 - total: 333,695), of any exhibitions by contemporary artists that year, as published in our own "Exhibition visitor figures in 2002" (The Art Newspaper, No.133, February 2003). Wim Wenders was born in Duesseldorf in 1945. His background is rich and varied. He studied medicine and philosophy in Munich, Freiburg and Duesseldorf, then threw all that over to study painting and work as an engraver. A philosophical inclination has, however, remained with him and he is a convert to Protestantism from Catholicism, via Buddhism, and in 1995 he was awarded an honorary degree in divinity by the University of Feiburg in Switzerland. In 1976 he entered the world of film and moved to the US in 1978, living between the US and Germany ever since. His most famous films are "The State of Things" {1982), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year, "Paris, Texas" (1984). "Wings ofDesire" (1987) and "Buena Vista Social Club" (1999).
The Art Newspaper: You reputation as an outstanding film director has long overshadowed your photographic work. To many people, these 'Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" are quite a surprise, although the book was published in 2001 and similar works were shown in Berlin and Bilbao. Despite including some images from your previous travelling exhibition (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1986) and 1987 photo book, Written in the West, many viewers will ask, which medium comes first, cinema, or photography? Wim Wenders: "Storytelling" would be the overriding interest, and during the times I'm working on a film. nothing is more important, while when I travel just with my photo camera, I am equally single-minded.
TAN: Some pictures go back to 1983, when you made your road trip across Western USA, taking colour stills in California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona with a medium.format camera while scouting locations for your first American film, "Paris, Texas"(1984). Are the two mediums, film and photo, separate or interrelated? WW: They are related, sure, and they have a few things in common, like the act of framing, or the desire to preserve something. But.as far as my main interest goes - the storytelling aspect of both crafts - they couldn't be more different from each other. A photograph is always just a suggestion of a story that you can rarely pursue. Photos, as 1 see it, leave you with the constant desire to know more than they reveal and theyre a "one on one" relationship, for the photographer as well as for the viewer, which is what I like so much about them. It's such a relief that you can do it on your own. Film making is always a group effort. As far as storytelling goes, you cannot just depict a moment. You have to tie all these moments together and make the characters and the story that comes out of them your main concern. You might have to sacrifice the best moments of what you shot, your most beautiful images, to the whole of the film, for which you have to find a beginning and an end. A film is an act in time. As a director, you're a sort of an architect whose main ingredients are time and space, while every photograph comes with its own time and its own space.
TAN: Why are they called "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth"? WW: I had to find a title. I just looked at all the pictures I had selected, and the thought came to me that the Earth was a strange, unknown place, after all.
TAN: Is there a deliberate, technical shift from the 35mm fomat (whether slides made with a Leica, or all Arriflex loaded with film stock) to these medium format 6x7mm, colour negatives, shot with a handheld Makina Plaubel? WW: Yes. It was only when I discovered that format and that camera (although I have used others since, especilally 6X9 cameras and panoramic formats) that my photographic interest and my painterly interest finally matched and that I realised colour was my photographic medium, and the resolution of that 6x7 negative was just so much more satisfying. As you must have noticed, my photographic subjects are places and landscapes. Somehow, I never thought that a 35mm negative could do them justice. In a way, I only became a photographer when I started to work with that format.
TAN: Beyond that, what led you to adopt the panoramic 17x6cm format in some later photographs of Australia, Havana, Israel, Montana and Japan? Aside from its greater, virtually cinematic scope, is this a deliberate echo of the 19th-century landscape tradition of photographic panoramas, and particularly of the panoramic views that once documented westward expansion in America? WW: I wasn't thinking of those when I started to work with the panoramic format, I was only thinking of the big horizon in Australia, and I bought my first panorama camera for that, a Japanese "Art panorama 6x17". It got stolen since, and I'm now working with a Fuji 6x17 which has the advantage that I can change lenses. Then I just became addicted to that width; I started to miss the extra space left and right. And when I realised that this camera could even make vertical pictures without much distortion, I started to use it also in the cities. But it is sort of cumbersome, as it only opens to 5:6 or 8, and you can only have four photographs on one 120 film, so my old Plaubel doesn't get rusty.
TAN: All the pictures are large; some are huge (2 by 4.5 metres). Is bigger better? WW: Bigger is never better per se, nor more beautiful. But some of these landscapes and places that I photographed deserved nothing else but the biggest possible prints. I was limited by the size of photo paper, otherwise I would have gone even bigger. I took these photographs, so that the viewer could stand there with me. To understand these places you havo to immerse yourself in them.
TAN: Unlike some photographers concerned with the veracity of reportage, far from being reluctant to modify the image on the negative by cropping or enlarging the original at the printing stage, you look for the underlying structures that best define a picture's formal values. Does this include digital manipulation or colour enhancement? WW: The big panoramas are printed very conservatively, with the traditional colour and contrast correction available for that. There is no distal process yet that could handle these sizes, as far as I know. The smaller formats are printed with the help of a digital process, by light-jet. They're also C-prints, but they were digitised and colour correction was done with the infinitely wider range of possibilities you have in the digital domain.
TAN: Whatever the location of the chosen subject, vivid colours predominate, as does careful attention to the composition - usually frontal, centred on the motif from ground level - with some aerial views, particularly of vast geological sites like the huge, ancient coral reefs of the "Bungle Bungles" or the enormous "Meteor Crater" in West Australia. Does this stylistic orchestration respond to specific narrative elements? WW: I understand places more through colour and light than by shapes, I guess, although that is somehow foolish to say - you can't really separate those. I do like the act of framing immensely. That's why I take all my pictures, with very few exceptions, hand-held. There's a spontaneity left in the framing, which I miss once the camera is on a tripod. And yes, you're right, I do like to put things in the centre. I always did. Framing is alltogether psychological, mostly subconscious act. I guess I learned it more from painting than from movies. Dutch landscape painting and Vermeer, have taught me all about framing. Maybe that's another reason why I like the panoramic format so much.
TAN: Your "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" clearly acknowledge the nomadic, documentary tradition of Eugene Atget, echoing Walker Evans' "American Photographs" (1938), Robert Frank's "The Americans" (1958) and Robert Adams' "The New West" (1974). Do they also represent a creative progression from earlier black and white to colour, as in "William Eggleston's Guide" (1976)? WW: I'm familiar with all of those great photographers but my photography really doesn't owe anything to other photographers or to the history of photography. I was predisposed, so to speak, by my admiration for painting, and I made my own experiences with photography, from my childhood on. The cameras that I owned shaped my photographic eye more than anything else: that cheap Rolleiflex I had first, which 1 couldn't handle because looking down into it from above was something totally strange to me. The first SLR I had, an East-German Edixa. Then my father's Leica which was my greatest treasure and which really taught me how to see etc, etc, up to my Plaubel. With that, I made a quantum leap for myself.
TAN: With the exception of a couple of early pictures taken in Houston, the street scenes of Havana - unrelated to, but made while filming "The Buena Vista Social Club" (1988) - some Russian soldiers in Berlin and one shop window in Tokyo, people are conspicuously absent from most of these images. Why is this? WW: I very often wait for them to leave the frame. In movies, they're always there, and I get obsessed with their lives and their stories. But most of my movies started with a desire to explore a certain city, a certain landscape. In the shoot, places then step back, so to speak, become "background", although I meant for them to be leading actors as well.
TAN: Whether images of landscapes or cities, all these pictures seem permeated by a sense of solitude. WW: I am very much attracted by things and places that are about to disappear. I'm glad that they can be remembered via these pictures.
TAN: The personality of the photographer is largely absent. Is this deliberate? WW: I couldn't disagree more. The photographer can never hide. He's always present in every picture he takes, as some sort of invisible reverse angle. His "attitude" always shows. There is no simple document. These's always a very elaborate correlation between the photographer and his or her "object". It is never neutral.
TAN: Your photographs seem to encapsulate a response to architecture, humanity, millennial grandeur, the American West, biblical legend, and the spiritual promise of the East. How.does this accord with your notion of the treasure trove of visual experiences acquired by children that informs the way they later visualise and interpret the world? WW: I do think that what you're able to see and strive towards is very much determined when you am a child. I'm not saying we can't expand and learn, but the grid, the structure and the openness to discover, have a lot to do with the encouragement we were given as kids. How much of that we can carry into our adult life, is, in my opinion, a key question of any creativity.
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