Wim Wenders at James Cohan - New York

Although it is exhibited internationally, the photographic work of filmmaker Wim Wenders is not much known in the U.S. beyond a number of books. This exhibition, "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth," brought to New York audiences a firsthand look at the cinematic, beautifully barren landscapes of Texas, Montana, California and Israel, with a focus on large-format panoramic images. The show's title derives from a book of the same name, published in 2001, and from a traveling exhibition that recently appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. It comes as no surprise that these nondigital photographs recall such Wenders films as Paris, Texas (1984). Several of the photos were taken while Wenders scouted locations, and some of them were exhibited and published in Written in the West (1987).

The four largest photographs included here are the product of an Art Panorama medium-format camera, with a 90mm lens covering a 90-degree angle of view. Its large 2 5/16-by-6 11/16-inch negative results in distortion-free prints with fine grain and considerable depth of field. The 6-by-15-foot expanse of At the Horizon: Rocky Mountains, Montana (2000) has the visual impact of a landscape viewed from above as it recedes into the distance. A wide sweep of blond fields with round bales of Montana hay foregrounds a scattering of black cattle grazing in the far middle distance, under a similarly random distribution of scudding clouds whose shadows fall across the land toward the mountains beyond.

Two prints of the same size further demonstrate Wenders's preoccupation with the silent landscape. Indian Cemetery, Montana (2000) centers on a small collection of graves on a hillside, some of them outlined with weathered, plank frames and marked by wooden crosses, granite headstones and floral tributes. At this site are the bones of people who died in Vietnam and others who were born during the Civil and Indian Wars. Storm clouds pile up above the sere plain, and in the foreground, a granite marker is etched with a mountain range, two pines and the words "Traveling Wolf, born 1878, died 1961."

The remains of a Roman roadway flanked by boulders leads directly into the picture plane of The Road to Emmaus, Near Jerusalem (2000), a photograph suffused with coral twilight. The road disappears into a darkening, unforgiving landscape, reappearing in the far distance as a winding path. In the 4-by-5-foot Flammable, Terlingua, Texas (1983), a sky of the same dark hue infuses the landscape with the quiet before a storm. Its ominous, stoic quality admits Wenders's affection for the endless pause of Edward Hopper.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group