Wim Wenders: Instant Stories

A kind parent of one of the pupils I teach has just given me, whether by chance or intent, an incredibly fitting book that ties in so well with the Ed Ruscha challenge.  Wim Wenders took thousands of Polaroids while making his classic films and in the book Instant Stories he shares 36 stories behind them, accompanied by 403 of his Polaroids. The artists book accompanied a 2017 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, London in which over 200 of the images were on display.

These personal and previously unseen Polaroids of Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Wim Wenders (b.1945, Germany) provide an insight into the artist’s thought processes, preoccupations and aesthetic inspirations.

Wim Wenders (1977) They were made from the gut. Valley of the Gods, Utah.

Wim Wenders (1973) Heinz.

“The entire Polaroid process (and procedure) has nothing to do with our contemporary experience, when we look at virtual and vanishing apparitions on a screen that we can delete or swipe to the next one.  Then, you produced and owned ‘an original’!  This was a true THING, a singular object of its own, not a copy, not a print, not multipliable, not repeatable.  You couldn’t help feeling that you had stolen this image-object from the world. You had transferred a piece of the past into the present.”

Wim Wenders: Instant Stories 2017 HERE