As a filmmaker, Wim Wenders is known for celebrating the dry, dusty majesty of West Texas – particularly Big Bend National Park – and the damp, grey drab of West Berlin. In a new exhibition of his photography at Blain|Southern Berlin, Wenders is again out west, in Texas (back in Paris) and Colorado (and elsewhere) but also in Germany, in the countryside around a Berlin where West is no longer best.
The images in ‘Time Capsules: By the Side of the Road’ stretch across both continents and (four) decades, making clear Wenders’ fascination with a Germany heavy with history and events, and a vast American West largely empty of people and their consequences (though Wenders manages to find both).
Some of the images on show are suitably epic in scale (one stretching a full 4.5 metres). Wenders is clear that his intent is less to take people to a particular place and time than to summon it up, as if by magic, to ‘transport people to those places in the world that I found and liked; photographs give me a chance to take the places to them’.
Upstairs in the gallery are smaller, older images, mostly in black and white, of people and places now much changed or long gone.
‘I think I had wide-open eyes for America,’ Wenders says, ‘and the American landscape in a general sense seemed extremely attractive to me, both as a photographer and a filmmaker. Maybe the long absence from Germany has enabled me to see places here with the same wide-open eyes. What has remained the same: in those landscapes, German or American, I’m still looking for traces of civilisation, of history, of people.’
As a filmmaker, Wenders is best known for his depictions of the majestic landscapes of West Texas and those of a damp, grey Berlin
The vast American West explored by Wenders is largely empty of people and their consequences (though he manages to find both)
The scale of the images on show is, at times, suitably epic, with one photograph stretching a full 4.5 metres
His intention is to evoke in the viewer the feelings he felt while visiting these places. 'Photographs give me a chance to take the places to them,' he explains
‘I think I had wide-open eyes for America,’ Wenders says, ‘and the American landscape in a general sense seemed extremely attractive to me, both as a photographer and a filmmaker'
'What has remained the same: in those landscapes, German or American, I’m still looking for traces of civilisation, of history, of people.' Pictured: Cisco Post Office 2003, 2015
Upstairs in the gallery are smaller, older images, mostly in black and white, of people and places now much changed or long gone. Pictured: Dusk in Coober Pedy, 1978
INFORMATION
’Time Capsules. By the Side of the Road. Wim Wenders’ Recent Photographs’ is on view until 14 November
Images courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern
ADDRESS
Blain|Southern
Potsdamer Straße 77–87
10785 Berlin
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