Wim Wenders’ Polaroid Diary (1973 – 1983)

 

Wim Wenders (b.1945, Germany) took thousands of Polaroids when he was making films between 1973 and 1983. “The thing is,” he says, “you gave them away. You had the person in front of you, whose picture you had just taken, and it was like they had more right to it. The Polaroids helped with making the movies, but they were not an aim in themselves. They were disposable.”

Tired of Polaroids, he gave his camera to Patti Smith. “Hers was old and damaged and letting the light in,” he says. “I had the same camera. I was never going to use it any more.”

 

 

Some of the 3,5000 Polaroids Wenders still possesses are on display at London’s Photographers’ Gallery. Wenders is delighted by his Polaroid diary. “My first reaction was, ‘Wow! Where did this all come from?’ I had forgotten about so much of it. I realised I had been taking pictures like a maniac.”

The show takes him back to a when “there was no sadness, no anger, there was nothing but sheer innocence, not only my own, but everyone around me. The films were made from one day to another without any great thinking process. They were made from the gut – and the Polaroids also are made from the gut.”

 

 

“If ever I had wanted to really take a picture of something, I would not have done it with a Polaroid. I never thought of it as giving the real picture…. The meaning of these Polaroids is not in the photos themselves – it is in the stories that lead to them. That’s why the exhibition is called Instant Stories – the catalogue is a storybook more than a photo book.” – Wim Wenders

 

“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.” – Wim Wenders

 

 

“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 is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, 20 October to 11 February.