Archive
Places, strange and quiet
OstLicht Gallery presented for the first time in Austria the exhibition »Places, Strange and Quiet« by the internationally renowned director and photographer Wim Wenders. This show brought together forty large-format photographs, made during last four decades: while travelling through Eastern Germany, Australia, Armenia and Japan, Wenders’ fascinated gaze enabled him to draw out the essence of any moment, place or space.
Wim Wenders’ photographs could be described as a survey of the inconspicuous. They mostly capture places void of people: abandoned, forgotten or unknown landscapes. They exude a subtle melancholy, exemplify a poetry of the forgotten and present things on the verge of disappearance. In his photographs, Wenders does not capture conventional or everyday recognisable spaces; instead, he is interested in the »invisible« and hence looks for the unknown or the seemingly marginal.
Photography has been an essential practice in Wenders’ oeuvre for over thirty years, since he drove through Western America in the early 1980s taking photographs while location scouting for his film »Paris Texas«. On his journeys he discovers unmarked areas on the map, and through their visual depiction he then challenges the presumptions or expectations that an observer might have about these areas. His intention with the photographs is to capture places and landscapes and to distil the memory of these. Wim Wenders’ photographs are almost always deserted, whether depicting a rusty Ferris wheel on an empty lawn in Armenia, an abandoned open air cinema in Palermo or a house in ruins in the former Jewish quarter of Berlin.
The photographs are available for sale in a limited edition.
IMPRESSIONS FROM THE OPENING
Open Air Screen 2007
Digital chromogenic print