Wim Wenders: Photos
Goethe Institutes, worldwide 1996
„When I was travelling through Australia for the first time, from its northern outpost all the way down to the south, I was in no way prepared for this continent, neither for the people who live in this expanse, nor for its glistening light, nor for the seemingly unreachable horizon…“
My Russian ‚Horizon‘ camera had been stolen and had been replaced by a Japanese ‚Art Panorama‘, a medium-format camera of rather unusual dimensions and, above all, extreme weight. The Aboriginals with whom I travelled only shook their heads in disbelief at the sight of this ballast and called me ‚Foto-Jarra‘ (or something like that) which was translated to me as ‚the madman with the camera‘. With temperatures reaching 113 degrees and more, the camera would sometimes become so hot that one could hardly touch it. But any other camera was out of the question. The horizon was so far and so perfectly straight, and the view so unlimited that only the 2.3 x 6.7 inch negative format seemed suitable to render a true reproduction of it all. No matter how far the horizon, it was the things in the foreground, every rock and every shrub, that became important to me… In the course of taking these pictures I, the photographer, became totally transparent as a subject. It takes a few nights of sleeping on desert ground and staring into the starry sky until you can scarcely keep your eyes open to value the experience of photographing again.
Wim Wenders