As a filmmaker, there’s no denying that Wim Wenders has a distinctive and immediately recognizable visual style. But did you know that, in the years before his film career really took off, he developed and honed a great deal of his visual creativity working in the medium of Polaroid photography?
As I have said before, still photography and filmmaking are all about telling stories, and to be a great photographer or a great film director, you need to be a great storyteller. Wim Wenders is a film director I have admired and whose career I have followed for many years. Some of his movies, like “Wings of Desire” and “Paris, Texas,” would definitely make the cut if I were forced to make a list of my favorite movies of all time. As a photographer, it’s very easy to be drawn to Wenders’ visually stunning movies since he always makes the backdrop of the action that is unfolding such an integral part of the stories that he tells.
It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Wenders was also an avid still photographer who, by his own reckoning, captured more than 12,000 Polaroid images during the decade in which he was developing his craft as a filmmaker—the period before his filmmaking career really started to blossom in the mid-1980s. Sadly, only about a quarter of these Polaroids still survive, but Wenders would subsequently organize them into a collection that was exhibited in London a few years ago and was also compiled into a book. This book captures an incredibly creative period in his life when he was still finding his way as a journeyman filmmaker.
In this latest video from the YouTube channel of Tatiana Hopper, Tatiana takes us on a tour through this unique collection of Wenders’ Polaroid images, showing how their evocative visual style presages and mirrors the distinctive and immediately recognizable atmosphere of the movies that Wenders would eventually go on to create. As an excellent still photographer herself, and having been trained as a filmmaker, Tatiana has a particular and well-honed sensibility for those visual aspects of storytelling that share common ground between filmmaking and still photography.
As photographers seeking to tell stories with still images, there is always a great deal that we can learn from artists working in parallel visual fields such as filmmaking. In this new video, as in her previous ones, Tatiana does an excellent job of identifying this common ground and drawing from it the lessons that we can apply in pursuit of the development of our own artistic voice.
