Single-Image Road Movies : Filmmaker Wim Wenders’ Photos Capture the West

“It’s heartbreaking to be in a place and realize it’s going to disappear without anyone having born witness to it,” says German filmmaker Wim Wenders, whose photographs of barren, unpopulated landscapes and ghost towns of the American Southwest pay homage to failed attempts at homesteading in terrain too tough to be tamed.

“In photographing a place you preserve it and give it honor and dignity, and I value photography’s capacity for preservation very highly. For my films I often choose locations or buildings because I know they’re soon to be permanently altered or demolished, and my photographs also usually include something on the verge of disappearing.”

The subject of an exhibition opening this week at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Hollywood, Wenders’ photographs have never been seen before in America, so this show offers a first look at a previously unknown aspect of his sensibility (a book of his photos, “Written in the West,” was published in Germany in 1987, but it’s hard to find here). The director of such critically acclaimed films as “Kings of the Road,” “Paris, Texas,” and “Wings of Desire,” Wenders has been taking photographs since he was a teen-ager and exhibiting them at the Galerie PPS in Hamburg, Germany, for several years.

Wenders regards much of his photographic work as “my private preparation for my films,” and the images in “Written in the West” were shot in 1983 during a three-month ramble through the Southwest while scouting locations for his 1984 film “Paris, Texas.” A tribute to the richly eccentric American road culture, Wenders’ book--like his film, “Paris, Texas”--represents the consummation of his love affair with the myth of the American West. A selection of this work is on view at Fahey/Klein, along with a series of panoramic photographs shot in Australia in 1988 while preparing for “Until the End of the World,” Wenders’ film set for a November release.

Anyone who attends the exhibition expecting to see rough, preparatory snapshots is in for a surprise, however, as Wenders is a remarkably skilled photographer. Technically, his images are stunning--crisp, luminous with incandescent color, heavy with an atmospheric weight evocative of the landscapes of Martin Heade Johnson. Wenders’ work is squarely in the tradition of classical landscape in that it’s intensely lyrical and infused with a sense of the insignificance of man when measured against the grandeur of nature. What makes his images modern is that, like Richard Misrach, Wenders photographs the residue of human failure; wrecked automobiles rusting like industrial dinosaurs on dusty plains, abandoned towns, seedy hotels and bars that look as though they were the last stop in lives in the process of grinding to a halt.

A further elaboration of themes central to Wenders’ films, his photographs are like single-image road movies in their exploration of ideas of exile, abandonment, the passage of time, and the search for home. The horizon line exists as an inviolable law in his pictures, telegraphing notions of destiny and the compulsion to keep moving, and in much of his work more than half the image is given over to sky. An indifferent blue canopy arching over parched terrain below, Wenders’ sky is like a beautifully painted theatrical backdrop in an existential play about loneliness and loss. The foreground of his pictures is occupied by curious fragments--a battered real-estate sign, a crumbling screen at an abandoned drive-in--that read as cast off souvenirs of lives long past. In talking about these profoundly melancholy pictures Wenders says “for me, the American West is the place where things decay. I call it the West, where things waste.”

It’s a place he dreamed about as a young man in Dusseldorf, where he spent endless hours in movie houses under the spell of such masters of the American Western as John Ford, Anthony Mann and Howard Hawks.

“My understanding of the American landscape was completely shaped by American Westerns because that’s where I saw it first,” said the 46-year-old artist during an interview at a West Hollywood hotel.

A soft-spoken man whose rigorous intelligence is tempered by a streak of flamboyant romanticism, Wenders is a peculiar combination of European philosophical traditions and American Pop culture. The son of a surgeon, he’s a well-read man who distanced himself from the psychological wreckage of World War II that surrounded him as a child by immersing himself in rock ‘n’ roll and movies. During the late ‘60s, it wasn’t unusual for him to see five films a day.

“American filmmakers almost single-handedly created the myth of the landscape of the American West and at this point it’s almost impossible--at least for me--to separate the myth from reality,” he observes. “I’ve spent a good deal of time in this landscape and my fantasy about it hasn’t dissolved at all. When I’m there I can still feel that it was pioneer country--maybe the pioneer country of all ages.

“When I envisioned the West prior to having seen it, I imagined a place that was fairly recently settled,” he continues, “so when I first went there I was surprised to discover that man had already abandoned this landscape. The road culture that once brought life to it is disappearing, and because of the weather and conditions there, it’s going very quickly. Soon it will be impossible to even travel through there by car. Americans are mostly clustered on the coasts and in the Midwest, and they only passed through the West. They tried to start something there but for some reason, they gave up and left. Civilization arrived, lingered for a moment, then moved on.”

Presently based in Berlin after having lived in the United States from 1978 to 1988, Wenders explains that his affinity for landscape wasn’t entirely shaped by movies.

“I’ve always loved landscape--in fact, when I was young I thought I was going to be a landscape painter when I grew up. I particularly like the Dutch landscapists and the German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrick; however, William Turner is the one I love the most. Actually, my name, William Wenders, translated into English means ‘to turn.’ My favorite landscape painters are from Europe but I don’t take many pictures there because the German landscape--like that of most of Central Europe--has been cultivated for centuries so you don’t find any empty places there. I find that oppressive and find it difficult to take pictures in places that have been occupied by man for so long.”

This isn’t to say that Wenders looks for virgin landscape--rather, he looks for land with discreet signs of former occupants.

“I called my book ‘Written in the West’ because after I’d gotten all the pictures together I realized there was something written--a sign, a poster, some graffiti--in almost every image. I found it very touching that in this empty, abandoned landscape traces of civilization were left in the form of writing. I also like the implication that people tried to make sense of this overwhelming and mysterious landscape by writing things into it. And finally, I like the fact that the landscape proved to be stronger than all these efforts to civilize it.

“Americans have an extremely playful relationship with signs and symbols and take great pleasure in signs and lettering,” he adds. “It’s one of my favorite things about this country--I love the billboards here and admire the fact that over the course of about 200 years Americans have transformed writing and language into a physical art. In Europe you don’t see this enthusiasm for signs and writing.”

Asked if other artists played a role in shaping his photographic style, Wenders says “Walker Evans has been the biggest influence on me. I admire him for his complete sincerity and for the humility he brought to his work. I get the sense from his pictures that he felt that whatever was in front of him was more important to him than himself. And of course, Robby Muller (the cinematographer on most of Wenders’ films) has been an important influence. We’ve been working together now for 23 years and I think we shaped each other’s visual sensibilities in immeasurable ways. In a way you can consider us twins.”

In explaining what he’s able to express with a still photograph that can’t be expressed in film, he says “compared with film, still photography has a certain finality that I find attractive. A moving picture by its very nature suggests what happened before and what will happen after it--you’re always in a storytelling mode with movies. A still photo on the other hand, is just one moment frozen in time and it allows you to tell things beyond the scope of a story. Of course, there are photographers who invite the viewer to construct a story around their images, but I prefer to look at pictures without the context of plot and story.

“Film revolves primarily around people,” he continues, “so part of the attraction of photography is that it touches on other areas--landscape, buildings, the sky. Because of the increasing dominance of the visual syntax of television, landscape is being forced more and more into the background. When we go to the movies now what we usually see is a close-up on an unfocused background and it’s become very unusual to see an action from a distance, composed within the context of a landscape. In the classic American Westerns, landscape was a fully fleshed out character given equal weight with the actors in the film. This is something we’re losing as visual language evolves. With photography one is able to treat landscape with the respect its due.”

Wenders’ manages to give landscape its due in his new film “Until the End of the World,” which is a veritable landscape jamboree. A sci-fi-love story-thriller set in 1999, the film wends its way through 20 cities in seven countries before winding up in the wide open spaces of Australia’s outback. Based on an idea originally conceived by Wenders on his first trip to Australia in 1977, the film has drawn inspiration from a variety of sources including “The Songlines,” Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite inquiry into the nomadic impulse, and novelist Paul Auster’s portrait of life in the late 20th Century, “In the Country of Last Things.”

Whereas Chatwin’s book on the Aborigines expresses a sense of profound loss for the changes the 20th Century has inflicted on that culture, it’s also infused with a belief in the indomitable persistence of spiritual traditions. The Auster book, on the other hand, is an unrelentingly bleak work that leaves one with a sense of crushing finality, of things truly and irrevocably ending. The sense of bone-rattling loneliness and estrangement that pervades Auster’s book is central to Wenders’ photographs too, and when he’s asked if he sees man as being at a critical point in history, he says, “Yes, I do have a sense of things completely breaking down, and that civilization as we know it is nearing an end.

“This belief is reflected in the deep sense of loneliness that often comes across in my photographs. That quality also has to do with the fact that it’s essential for me to be alone when I take pictures. When you’re with somebody you lose the intimacy you need with a place in order to photograph it--to photograph a landscape properly you need to disappear into it, and you must be alone to disappear. If you’re with somebody you can’t disappear because you must be there for that other person. If you’re alone you can completely merge with the landscape.

“Of course, most people consider loneliness a negative thing but it can be very positive and can prepare you to be with people in a better way. I’m leery of people who are unable to be alone--the inability to be alone is like a sickness. Movies are very much a collaborative medium, and as a filmmaker I know what it is to go for months without a moment of solitude. So, the solitary aspect of photography replenishes something very deep and important for me.”