He took pictures of raw landscapes, film crews and himself. The world-famous film director is also a photographer and early fan of the Polaroid camera. Discover gems from Wenders' collection of 12,000 shots.
The famous German film director is also a recognized photographer. He was one of the first Polaroid camera users, and his instant snapshots have more than autobiographical value, as an exhibition in Berlin shows.
From the late 60s until the early 80s, Wenders took around 12,000 snapshots with his Polaroid camera and gave most of them away. The remaining 3,500 were stored in old cigar boxes for decades. The Polaroid was big, clumsy and hard to focus, but you didn't have to take the film somewhere to have it developed. The pictures developed on their own — as if by magic.
Anyone who recalls 1970s America will see a world forever gone in these snapshots. They document a time, to quote the 72-year-old filmmaker, when "there was no sadness, no anger, there was nothing but sheer innocence, not only my own, but everyone around me."
Since Wenders usually gave little attention to the quality of his Polaroid photos, they seem all the more authentic. "If ever I had wanted to really take a picture of something, I would not have done it with a Polaroid," he said. Instead, it was a way to easily capture a fleeting moment.
In 1973 he met a tall young woman by chance in a nightclub in New York. Seeing that he was lonely, she told him to call her should he find himself alone in San Francisco. A week later, he did. Thus began Wenders' friendship with the young music photographer Annie Leibovitz, who took him along on a road trip to Los Angeles.
Perhaps every aging person grows melancholy recalling his youth. With Wenders, it was the 1970s and 80s. "I don't think I'm romanticizing when I allege that Polaroids were the last outburst of a time when we had certainty, not only in images. We had nothing but confidence in things, period."
When the news of John Lennon's assassination came, Wenders was on a Los Angeles freeway. "I pulled over and sat there and wept until there were no more tears left." Catching the next flight to New York, he soon found himself in the midst of thousands at a silent vigil in front of Lennon's house. "We had all lost something essential. For me, it was my childhood, my youth."
In Wenders' film "The American Friend," the late actor Dennis Hopper repeatedly takes snapshots of himself with a Polaroid. Hopper himself was a recognized photographer. Did the two trade notes? "Not really," says Wenders. "We made a film in which his character talks about photography a lot. But for Dennis, photography was a thing of the past."
Wim Wenders embarked on his project "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" in the 1980s, crisscrossing the globe and capturing images from countries like Australia, Cuba, Israel, Japan and the USA. They include many quiet, lonely landscapes and desolate scenes: a desert, an empty hotel lobby — or here, a road on the outskirts of a community in northeastern Germany named Welt (World).
Just like vinyl records, Polaroid film cameras have made a comeback, appealing to those who like the charm of this old analogue technology. Part of the fun are the few minutes of anticipation until the picture is ready. The colors can vary depending on the type of film and the temperature. With their vague contours and blend of colors, the pictures seemed veiled in a feeling of nostalgia.
Wenders has compared photography to "watching death at work," with the characteristics of a photo inevitably changing, fading or one day ceasing to exist altogether — like memories themselves, perhaps. The exhibition "Wim Wenders: Instant Stories" is on show at the C/O Berlin museum from July 7 through September 23.
"The Polaroids helped with making the movies, but they were not an aim in themselves. They were disposable," said Wim Wenders, who owned a Polaroid camera even before it was a consumer article.
Over the years, he took about 12,000 snapshots — giving most of them away.
When he dug out the ones he'd saved, Wenders remarked, "'Wow! Where did this all come from?' I had forgotten about so much of it. I realized I had been taking pictures like a maniac."
Since last year, the prize-winning filmmaker and author has revealed a selection of his Polaroids in the exhibition "Wim Wenders: Instant Stories," which has been shown in the US and the UK.
The exhibition makes its first and only stop in Germany, at the C/O Berlin museum, from July 7 until September 23. Along with the some 240 Polaroids on show, the exhibition presents excerpts of films in which Wenders used the medium of instant photography as part of the narrative.
The prize-winning filmmaker describes himself as "traveler first, then director or photographer"Image: imago/Xinhua
Wenders and Polaroids: A common past
The filmmaker acquired a prototype camera from the then new Polaroid Company and used it in his 1974 film, Alice in the Cities, about a man who loses his job over his passion for taking snapshots. The photos seen in the film have Wenders' trademark poetic touch, almost as though he perceived that they would one day have a timeless value.
Wenders captured moments on film sets, urban and rural landscapes, pictures of celebrities like Dennis Hopper as well as historic moments like the death of John Lennon.
"I was learning the craft of filmmaking in those years, and Polaroids were the perfect complementary tool: as a visual notebook, a quick way of 'framing' the world, a verification of my interest in people, places, objects, or simply as a way to remember things."
No more photography
The filmmaker stopped taking Polaroids 30 years ago. Although his repeated shots of everyday objects such as food seem to presage the Instagram age, he feels that photography itself has changed forever. "The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone," he says.
"I really don't know why we stick to the word photography any more. There should be a different term, but nobody cared about finding it."
Click on the gallery above for samples from the exhibition "Wim Wenders: Instant Stories."
