A new exhibition parallels Wim Wenders’ love for cinema with his love for photography

Unsurprisingly, iconic filmmaker Wim Wenders possesses not only a unique talent as an auteur but also a keen eye for photography, which visitors of Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York will be able to experience firsthand with Written Once. On view until March 15 are two photographic series, Written in the West and Once, taken by Wenders between the late 70s and early 80s, on which the title for the exhibition was based.

Two lasting and powerful forms of visual storytelling, film and photography, are positioned by most of us at opposite ends of the artistic spectrum, and, at first glance, it is easy to understand why. Fluid by nature, films depict broad periods of time and translate them into moving pictures that are viewed by us on the silver screen for our amusement. When we think in terms of cinema and the work of a director, our association instantly drifts towards entertainment, placing them effectively into the same category as books and theater. With the snap of a finger, one shot captured a fleeting, solitary moment; photography, on the other hand, is seen solely as an art form and exhibited alongside its stagnant counterparts: paintings, sculptures, and installations in museums and galleries across the world. But what many underestimated is the deep connection and influence that both assert on one another. After all, every movie is comprised of a plenitude of images, weaving a tapestry of stills into one cinematic experience, while photographs are commonly used as sources of inspiration and reference points for films, shaping a symbiotic relationship that is appreciated by directors, cinematographers, actors, and lighting technicians alike.

Equipped with a 6 x 7 medium format camera, Wenders embarked in late 1983 on a journey with the aim of scouring for subjects and locations to help him prepare for the shooting of his neo-Western road trip feature Paris, Texas (1984). Traveling for the next several months across the American West, he snapped images of desolate scenery, which became synonymous with his works, and captured the unique tones that permeated the film and were later showcased for the first time in 1986 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as printed in 2015 in a book published by Schirmer/Mosel, titled Written in the West Revisited. “It was another way of preparing for the film, too, a different kind of research that had less to do with locations than with the light in the West. I had never made a film in that landscape and was hoping that taking photographs would sharpen my understanding of the light and landscape, my sense of empathy with it. So although these photos were taken in connection with the film we made in that part of the country, they are quite independent of it, despite the fact that a lot of the photos were taken in Houston, Los Angeles, and other locations in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico where we did in fact shoot the film. But these large-format photos were my own personal, private way of preparing for the film,” explained Wenders.

Taking the words at the beginning of fairytales, “Once upon a time,” close to heart, Wenders fully embraced the concept of ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Documenting his travels and encounters in Hollywood in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Wenders accompanied each photo with a written anecdote that often starts out with “Once, I…..” Images in this series depict John Lurie, Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper, Claire Denis, Elia Kazan, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton. One of many highlights in the series is a 1977 photograph, When Martin Scorsese had a flat tire II, which was taken by him when he encountered Scorsese stranded at the side of the road with a flat tire, traveling the Valley of the Gods in Utah. A storyteller at heart, Wenders muses, “Every photo, every ‘once’ in time is also the beginning of a story… Every photo is the first frame of a movie.”

Wim Wenders Written Once is on display until March 15th at Howard Greenberg Gallery 41 EAST 57th STREET, SUITE 801, NEW YORK, NY