Wim Wenders: Photographs Along the Road

Back in August, the celebrated German director Wim Wenders visited New York City for the first stop of a new Janus Films retrospective, called Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road, which is touring nationally. Now, after a trip to the Toronto International Film Festival to promote his latest film, the 3D drama Every Thing Will Be Fine, Wenders is back in Berlin for the unveiling of his new photography exhibition, Time Capsules. By the side of the road, at the gallery Blain Southern. Wenders’s passion for photography has always been integral to his artistic vision, and he has worked closely with cinematographers like Robby Müller to execute his precise style. But published collections of Wenders's photography, such as Written in the West and Places, Strange and Quiet, demonstrate that he is a striking and talented photographer in his own right.

His latest exhibition features photographs, taken in Germany and the United States, that he says point to “the relationship between memory and photography” and the interplay between the different landscapes that have influenced him as an artist. In a new interview published on the website of The Economist, Wenders further explains his lifelong connection to the medium and to the anthropological inquiry at the heart of his work. “I am not a landscape photographer,” he explains. “I am interested in people. I am interested in our civilisation. I am interested in what traces we leave in landscapes, in cities and places. But I wait until people have gone, until they are out of the shot. So the place can start talking about us.”

Read a transcript of the conversation, or listen to it in full, over at the Economist's website.