A photographer's viewpoint; an interview with Wim Wenders

UNESCO Courier, April, 1988 by Alain Bergala

A photographer's viewpoint In preparation for the shooting of his film Paris, Texas towards the end of 1983, Wim Wender travelled around the American West armed with a medium-size hand camera, a Makina-Plaubel 6 x 7. During this journey through Texas, Arizona, New MExico and California looking for locations, he was struck by the seemingly infinite landscapes bathed in light and colour that often only retained a fleeting trace of civilization. The series of colour pictures which he took with this camera are both a tribute to the semi-mythical emotive power of the landscape and a reflection on memory. A selection of these photographs was published in 1987 under the title Written in the West, with an accompanying interview between Wim Wenders and the French critic and film director Alain Bergala, extracts from which we publish here.

Would you say that photography, more than film, allows you to capture an image of something that you are seeing for the first time?

Yes. With photography, you can visit a place only once. When you return to a place, you seldom feel any desire to take photographs. For me, the known or the familiar virtually rules out photography, which is a means of exploration, a journey. It's a bit like a car or plane, which takes you somewhere. A camera takes you somewhere.

Above all, it makes it possible to stop and take things in properly.

Especially in the West, travelling by car, the camera gave me a reason and an obligation to stop. I don't take photographs out of the window.

How did it happen, exactly--stopping, deciding to take a photograph and choosing the frame for the subject?

You arrive in a place, a village, for example, you stop, and you feel a sort of excitement, even before you have come across what you are going to photograph. You have a feeling for the place: there is something in the light, a special atmosphere. My photographs are often linked to a certain surface texture of landscape and houses. That particular surface is something that you feel before you have really found the place to photograph. For example, I arrived in a little town in New Mexico which is also called Las Vegas, and there I took a photograph of an empty shop, painted blue and red. I had a presentiment, when I started strolling around, that I would find this house. Arriving in that deserted town, with that afternoon light and nobody in the streets, I knew that I would stay there and that I would have to find a hotel, because I would not be able to leave again. The place could not be in the film because it was too remote, but I went there because I was interested in seeing another Las Vegas.

In the West, there are a lot of billboards and cinema facades that have already been half eaten away by the elements and are in the process of disappearing. There is a connection between photography and this damaged surface. In the cinema, too, I have often chosen a site for shooting because I knew that a particular house was going to be demolished. For example, in The American Friend, we filmed in front of a row of houses because we had read in a newspaper that the whole neighbourhood was going to be demolished. In large cities like Houston, the opposite is true: the surface was so new that it all looked like a model.

So making an image means looking at things before they disappear ...

In these photos there is the desire to look at something and the desire to keep it. The word is appropriate in French: re-garder. The photographs taken by Walker Evans during the Depression convey this exactly: looking at and committing to memory something that was going to disappear in three or four years' time.

This is just the feeling that we have when we look at photographs by Atge. of certain street corners and little shops in Paris ...

I think this was his whole ethic: that he saw himself as a "preserver". I always appreciate this preservation side of photography.

It gives all these photographs an air of the end of the world, especially the little towns, street corners and shops ... As if you had taken these photographs just after the world had come to an end. We do not get the same feeling from Paris, Texas, which conveys a sense of beginning, among other things. In this voyage of discovery, was there a melancholy feeling connected with the photography?

Melancholy is also connected with the American West, and we can talk about that. But in photography, more than in film, there is an idea of the end of the world. I remember what Nicholas Ray said to me one day about some actors whom he was teaching. He told them: "Even if you are asking for a light for your cigarette, or if you simply say hello, it is absolutely necessary that you do it as if it were for the last time." I was impressed by this idea of doing something as if it were for the last time, and for me this is connected wit photography. That is the "end of the world" side of things. In fact, I took this phogoraph because I knew that it was the first and last time that I would see this house. But, conversely, the very fact that there is a photograph proves that the world is continuing.