Snapshots from the Edge

WIM WENDERS TAKES HIS CAMERA ON THE ROAD

Given his father's Leica camera as a child, Wim Wenders began to practice the art of seeing, making images in his mind's eye. Best known for his finely crafted films— Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, and Paris, Texas—Wenders has for years been taking photographs of the spaces between things, the open-ended world of possibility one discovers while on the road. "When I make a film, its characters and its story drive all my thinking," says Wenders. "When I am a photographer, I let myself be driven by my subjects. Places ... landscapes, cities." "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth," an exhibition of his large-scale panoramic photographs, opens this month at New York's James Cohan Gallery. Born in Diisseldorf, the filmmaker and photographer, now 58, grew up amid the debris of postwar Germany, consuming American Westerns, romanticizing images of a distant horizon and cowboy culture.

His photographs capture the grand colors of the natural landscape, punctuated by the thumbprint of man—deserted Montana storefronts against the big sky, Havana lost in time. "I was only influenced by painters," says Wenders. "By Vermeer, by Dutch landscape painters, by Beckman, by Hopper, by Klee. My sense of framing, and all the subconscious decisions that come with it, stems entirely from painting."

"Wenders has an innate ability to take the grand and distill it into a singular, existential moment," says gallerist James Cohan. Wenders, currently shooting a new film with the working title Angst and Alienation in America, doesn't take photographs while making a movie. "Too distracting. The two acts demand a different frame of mind." He goes on to say, "Taking photographs allows me for once to be a child again and to lose myself entirely in the world."

A. M. HOMES