Another Epinions orphan. Another review of this book appears at Green Man Review.
To be quite honest, I’m not familiar with Wim Wenders’ films. After leafing through Once, I have a feeling I’d like them. Characterized on the jacket flap as “autobiographical sketches,” they seem to me to be more on the order of Ned Rorem’s “high gossip” – familiar, diaristic, a little gossipy, dropping names like crazy – Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Harry Dean Stanton – the names one might expect. There are also encounters with the anonymous – a little girl in Russia, an unknown actor in Hollywood – that are illuminating of the richness found in the mundane.
Most of the sketches come with photographs, which are usually spare, lean, uninflected – the kind of casual, “dumb” imagery that comes out of Pop Art, the photography of Gary Winogrand, and deconstructionist semantics. I happen to find them quite wonderful, almost magical in many cases – in spite of (or maybe because of) their leanness, they are often tremendously evocative, and to me offer insight into Wenders’ aesthetic stance – some of the series are almost like film, a slow pan through a desolate landscape with surprising and sometimes surreal details. As Wenders says in his introduction,
This is a good book to just wander through, touching ground here and there, backtracking, taking another look at a certain view, absorbing the stories (the prose is cast as verse, even though it’s not, really), and finding little treasures here and there (the “Mighty Mouse” sketch is delightful, even though regrettably lacking photographs). It’s a world-wide ramble, with stops in Australia, Russia, Germany, the US, India, Algiers, and some surprizing places as well – Butte, Montana, for example. There are reproductions of unfixed Polaroids that Wenders found in a drawer, which are some of the most haunting images in the book.
How much do I like this book? I bought it. I don’t usually buy art books, because they are an addiction that I finally broke (after learning the hard way that it’s very easy to run out of space and money), but this one is too rare and wonderful to pass up. Be warned, however – liking this book depends on a certain degree of openness and sophistication in both visual art and literature, and, to be quite honest, if you can’t stand photographers like Lewis Baltz or Robert Frank, you will have trouble with this book. On the other hand, if you are one of those who is constantly looking for ideas and images, places to jump off from and go wandering through your own imagination, I think you’ll like it just fine. I know it’s going to have some impact on my own work – I’m looking forward to it.
(Distributed Art Publishers (orig. Shirmer-Mosel, 1993), n.d.)
Most of the sketches come with photographs, which are usually spare, lean, uninflected – the kind of casual, “dumb” imagery that comes out of Pop Art, the photography of Gary Winogrand, and deconstructionist semantics. I happen to find them quite wonderful, almost magical in many cases – in spite of (or maybe because of) their leanness, they are often tremendously evocative, and to me offer insight into Wenders’ aesthetic stance – some of the series are almost like film, a slow pan through a desolate landscape with surprising and sometimes surreal details. As Wenders says in his introduction,
A photograph is always a double image,
Showing, at first glance, its subject,
But at a second glance – more or less visible,
“hidden behind it,” so to speak,
the “reverse angle”:
the picture of the photographer
in action.
This is a good book to just wander through, touching ground here and there, backtracking, taking another look at a certain view, absorbing the stories (the prose is cast as verse, even though it’s not, really), and finding little treasures here and there (the “Mighty Mouse” sketch is delightful, even though regrettably lacking photographs). It’s a world-wide ramble, with stops in Australia, Russia, Germany, the US, India, Algiers, and some surprizing places as well – Butte, Montana, for example. There are reproductions of unfixed Polaroids that Wenders found in a drawer, which are some of the most haunting images in the book.
How much do I like this book? I bought it. I don’t usually buy art books, because they are an addiction that I finally broke (after learning the hard way that it’s very easy to run out of space and money), but this one is too rare and wonderful to pass up. Be warned, however – liking this book depends on a certain degree of openness and sophistication in both visual art and literature, and, to be quite honest, if you can’t stand photographers like Lewis Baltz or Robert Frank, you will have trouble with this book. On the other hand, if you are one of those who is constantly looking for ideas and images, places to jump off from and go wandering through your own imagination, I think you’ll like it just fine. I know it’s going to have some impact on my own work – I’m looking forward to it.
(Distributed Art Publishers (orig. Shirmer-Mosel, 1993), n.d.)
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