Light fantastic: the road trip that inspired Paris, Texas
In preparation for his 1984 film Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders set out on a road trip through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The trip resulted in the photo series Written in the West, which was first exhibited in 1986 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 'It was another way of preparing for the film, a different kind of research that had less to do with locations than with the light in the west,' says Wenders. Written Once is at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, until 15 March
'Although these photos were taken in connection with the film we made in that part of the country, they are quite independent of it. They were all made in locations where we did in fact shoot the film. But these large-format photos were my own personal, private way of preparing for it'
'Once, I drove to a screening of Paris, Texas together with Harry Dean Stanton, in a limo that almost stretched over two blocks. Even in the middle of New York, Harry was still Travis sitting in the back of his brother's car and travelling through the desert in silence'
'I had never made a film in that landscape and was hoping that taking photographs would sharpen my understanding of the light and landscape, my sense of empathy with it'
'Once, I was in Montreal, when Jim Jarmusch was showing Down By Law there. In my memory, it was raining when I took this picture of Jim, and I was sure he was holding an umbrella. But there was no umbrella in the photograph and certainly not on the negative. Instead, I discovered Roberto Benigni in the background'
'Very often, the ideas you have in advance about the colours in a film quickly begin to look tired. So my only aim in taking these photos was to improve my own capacity to react to colours; to become more open to colours; simply to get to know them better. I took a whole lot of photos purely for the colours, which was quite a new departure for me'
'In 1941, the actor Elisha Cook Jr had a supporting part in the movie The Maltese Falcon by John Houston, based on Dashiell Hammett's novel by the same title. In my movie about Hammett's life, Elisha played a cab driver'
'In the middle of the godforsaken Valley of the Gods, and after not seeing any other car for hours, we came upon a car parked by the side of the road. It was jacked up and a man's legs were sticking out from under it. We stopped behind it to see if we could help. The woman standing by the troubled car turned out to be Isabella Rossellini, the man crawling out from under it was none other than Martin Scorsese'
'[This is] the lounge in a little hotel, which had been closed down for a long time, where I saw all these incredible armchairs in all those colours. I tried to get in but it was all locked up. At last I found an old man who had the keys and he suspiciously let me in. The 'surface' that interested me was the colours of the armchairs, four or five different colours. They were in a semicircle, which looked slightly theatrical in itself. You didn't even feel that the characters were missing, because it was as if the armchairs were talking to each other'
'John Lurie, great actor and sax player, and obviously quite a kisser too'
'Once, together with Dennis Hopper, we drove from Los Angeles all the way up to Barstow in the middle of the Mojave Desert, to see Nick Ray. Miloš Forman was shooting the movie version of Hair, and Nick played the general in it, in spite of the cancer he had just been diagnosed with. Dennis knew Nick from a long time ago, when Nick had given him a small part in Rebel Without a Cause. Dennis had become best friends with James Dean. Later that night the conversation inevitably turned to James Dean and Nick proudly declared: 'I taught him how to walk!''
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- The Guardian
Sebastião Salgado captured the world like no other photographer
It's a testament to the epic career of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who died this week at age 81, that this year has already seen exhibitions of hundreds of his photos in Mexico City, France and southern California. Salgado, who in his lifetime produced more than 500,000 images while meticulously documenting every continent on earth and many of the major geopolitical events since the second world war, will be remembered as one of the world's most prodigious and relentlessly empathetic chroniclers of the human condition. An economist by training, Salgado only began photographing at age 29 after picking up the camera of his wife, Lélia. He began working as a photojournalist in the 1970s, quickly building an impressive reputation that led him to the prestigious Magnum Photos in 1979. He spent three decades photographing people in modern societies all over the world before stepping back in 2004 to initiate the seven-year Genesis project – there, he dedicated himself to untouched landscapes and pre-modern human communities, a project that would guide the remainder of his career. His late project Amazônia saw him spend nine years preparing a profound look into the terrain and people of the Amazon rain forest. In 2014 the German director Wim Wenders teamed up with the photographer's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado to co-produce a documentary celebrating Salgado's work titled The Salt of the Earth. While covering 40 years of Salgado's creative output, the film also centers around his decision to temporarily abandon photography after witnessing firsthand the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Amid that crisis he founded his Instituto Terra in 1998 – ultimately planting hundreds of thousands of trees in an effort to help reforest Brazil's Rio Doce valley – and through his communion with the land slowly pieced his way back to photography. Salgado tirelessly, and probably also recklessly, threw himself into his work – while documenting Mozambique's civil war in 1974 he ran afoul of a landmine, and later, in Indonesia in the 1990s, he caught malaria, leading to ongoing medical issues for the remainder of his life. He spent nearly two months walking Arctic Russia with the Indigenous Nenets, encountering temperatures as cold as -45C, and he also recounted walking nearly 1,000km through Ethiopia because of the lack of roads. Late in life, Salgado was forced to have a surgical implant in order to retain use of his knee in the course of making his Amazônia project. His biblical landscapes are often taken from thousands of feet in the air – one imagines him leaning out of a helicopter, angling for the perfect framing. He was known for utilizing virtually every mode of conveyance available in pursuit of the new and unseen – car, truck, ship, helicopter, plane, even canoe, hot-air balloon, Amazon riverboat and others. Prints of Salgado's work – always black and white, and generally printed at a dazzlingly high contrast – were as sizable as his ambitious, landing as overwhelming presences in galleries and museums. He was known for blacks that were as inky as they come, and his landscapes also show a remarkable obsession with rays of light shining through rainclouds, around mountains and off of water. He loved the graininess that came from film – so much so, that when he finally traded in his trusty Leica for a digital camera, he often digitally manipulated his images to bring in a grain reminiscent of real film. For as much as Salgado was a photographer of extremes, he could also do tonal nuance – many of his landscapes are only capable of capturing their terrain's immensity due to his careful use of mid-tones, and Salgado's human portraiture often abandoned the high contrast for a rich subtlety. No matter how enormous his subjects were, he always retained a remarkable human touch. When photographing Brazil's Serra Pelada gold mine he made images showing the workers as thousands of ants scrambling up perilously sheer walls of dirt, yet also captured indelible expressions of effort and pride on the faces of individual, mud-soaked laborers. His image of the Churchgate train station in Bombay, India, shows thousands of commuters in motion, looking like a literal flood of humanity surging around two waiting trains. One snap of a firefighter in Kuwait working to cap the oil wells that Saddam Hussein set ablaze shows a man hunched over in a posture of utter exhaustion, one of countless examples of Salgado's incredible ability to limn the human form via film. Given everything that Salgado shot over his incredible six decades of work, it's hard to imagine what else he could have done. Upon turning 80 last year, he had declared his decision to step back from photography in order to manage his enormous archive of images and administer worldwide exhibitions of his work. He also showed his dim outlook for humanity, telling the Guardian: 'I am pessimistic about humankind, but optimistic about the planet. The planet will recover. It is becoming increasingly easier for the planet to eliminate us.' It will probably take decades to fully appreciate and exhibit Salgado's remaining photographs, to say nothing of grappling with the images he showed during his lifetime. One hopes that amid a period of increasing global strife, environmental collapse and threats to the mere notion of truth, this remarkable output will remain a beacon of decency and humanity – and help us chart a path back from the brink.
The Independent
26-04-2025
- The Independent
Paris's Pompidou is closing – visit these six overlooked museums instead
The Centre Pompidou, Europe 's largest contemporary and modern art collection, is as fundamental to Paris sightseeing landmarks as the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay or even the Eiffel Tower. The building itself is part of the attraction; often compared to an oil refinery or a container ship, it shocked the public when it opened in 1977. I've always thought it looks more like a hamster cage, with thousands of daily visitors scuttling up the tube-like escalators on the outside of the museum to get one of the best views of Paris's rooftops from the third floor. From September, the Pompidou will be closing its doors for five years of renovations, leaving a gaping hole in many Paris getaways. The permanent collections have already closed, so those wishing to see Andy Warhol's Ten Lizes in the flesh will need to wait until 2030. If you're quick, you can still make it to the temporary exhibitions. 'Paris Noir', the city through the lens of the immigration which shaped it during the 20th century, is on until 30 June, and the works of Suzanne Valadon (an artist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who frequently painted portraits of Montmartre cabaret dancers) is showing until 26 May. The final exhibition before closure will focus on contemporary photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (13 June–22 September). Originally known for portraits and gay scenes, his more recent works include astrophotography, abstract work and landscapes. Buy tickets in advance – the partial closure hasn't made the Pompidou any less popular. The temporary closure of an old favourite presents a new opportunity to discover Paris, and its often-overlooked smaller museums and galleries, outside the box – and there are more than 130 museums in the city, many eccentric and obscure. Cast your mind back to the hobbies of lost acquaintances from school and you'll probably find there's a museum dedicated to them. Stamp collecting? Check. Coin collecting? Check. Personally I had a morbid fascination with diseases – there's a museum that panders to my hobby. Fortunately, there's no museum dedicated to nose picking (yet). Here are six weird and wonderful museums to fill the Pompidou's hamster cage-shaped hole. The Funfair Museum (Musée des Arts Forains) A jump through time into the funfairs of early 20th-century Paris, this museum has you half expecting to see cartoon penguins break into dance and Dick Van Dyke on a carousel horse, like in Mary Poppins. Situated inside an old wine cellar, it's full of vintage merry-go-rounds, fairground games and puppet shows, and visitors can even have a go on the old rides. Guided visits are in French, but the guides generally make an effort to translate key parts into English. Opening Wednesdays, weekends and school holidays by prior reservation, no ticket office on site; The Sewers Museum (Musée des Égouts) Going down into the sewers of a capital city sounds pretty gross, but channel your inner Ratatouille and find there's something eerily beautiful about Paris's waste evacuation system. Take a guided tour to learn about the different animals that lived in Paris's sewers, many much less native to the city than rats, and the often unfortunate people that worked here. The stories are at once sordid and inspiring, from how an underground network of more than 1,600 miles was created, to the disease-ridden Paris of the 17th–19th centuries. Opening Tuesday–Sunday; The Wine Museum (M. Musée du Vin) First a 14th-century limestone quarry, next the cellars of a Franciscan Monastery during the 15th century, wine was produced and stored on the site of the modern-day Wine Museum as early as 600 years ago. Inside the vaults are exhibitions and models tracing the history of French winemaking and notable figures in viticulture, and for €4 extra, a glass of the 'wine of the month' is included with your ticket. Book the 'afterwork' package on Friday evenings for a drinks and food package, and a DJ set in the vaults. The European Photography Museum (Maison Européenne de la Photographie) With multiple temporary exhibitions that change most months, there's always something new to discover at the MEP. The permanent collection has photos from around the world – from the 1950s to the present day – from some of the world's best-known photographers, such as Irving Penn and Robert Frank. It scratches the itch of the Pompidou's now-closed photography gallery. Musée Cernuschi The 19th-century Italian banker and collectionist Henri Cernuschi spent two years travelling around Asia, collecting art, objects and curiosities now displayed in his mansion (the building is beautiful and worth a visit in its own right). There are almost 15,000 works, spanning some 5,000 years of history, with the largest collection being ancient Chinese art. The permanent collection is free, temporary exhibitions are chargeable. Open Tuesday–Sunday; The Plaster Cast Museum (Musée des Moulages) Morbidly fascinating, the Musée des Moulages – which is situated inside a hospital – has almost 5,000 plaster casts of different diseases, afflictions and injuries which were used to teach medical students in the absence of something more sophisticated. Created between 1867and 1958, the plaster casts detail the effects of everything from leprosy to syphilis in graphic detail. Through a modern lens, it looks like the dressing room on a film set – Game of Thrones' Hall of Faces perhaps. Hôpital Saint-Louis is still a working hospital; the museum and library is in a separate wing.
Telegraph
24-04-2025
- Telegraph
‘It's my proudest achievement': Tate Modern at 25
Ten days before Tate Modern opened in a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames, a trustee of the gallery expressed concern that nobody would find it. 'He was really worried,' recalls Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director from 1988 to 2017. 'And I had to say, 'Well, you live in Chelsea, and it's rather a long way from Chelsea to Bankside, but I think other people will find their way across Blackfriars Bridge.'' They did. Despite 'a slight sense of disbelief, because it had all happened relatively quickly', Serota had an inkling from the off that Tate Modern would be a success, because, he recalls, 'the Queen didn't disapprove when she opened it' on May 10, 2000, even if 'she was a bit nonplussed by what she was being shown'. The first work to greet Elizabeth II was Maman (1999), a gigantic bronze spider by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, which, to mark Tate Modern's 25th birthday, is returning to the same spot, on top of a footbridge, ahead of a weekend of events next month. 'I remember taking the Queen into a room of Bridget Riley's [abstract] paintings,' Serota says. 'Afterwards, she said, 'It was rather dazzling.'' Nobody, though, predicted the scale of the gallery's success. Tate Modern had prepared for two million visitors, but, during its first year alone, five million people came to check it out. I was one of them, captivated, like everybody else, by the vast, awe-inspiring void of the 500ft-long Turbine Hall, which, Serota says, 'challenged artists to make proposals on a scale and with a boldness that they hadn't been able to achieve elsewhere'. It became the backdrop for some of the most spectacular art installations ever staged in this country – including, unforgettably, The Weather Project (2003), by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. This gigantic, illusory sun, powered by 200 mono-frequency lights, seemed to be setting beneath a mirrored ceiling – and, Eliasson tells me, 'transformed' his career. He remembers waking up after the press preview to find his work reproduced on every front page on a news-stand near his hotel: 'It was a big thing.' Materially, he tells me, the installation 'was very easy to do: just half a disc, smoke, and mirrors.' But the 'unifying and inclusive' underlying concept – creating, as he puts it, 'a living environment', in the manner of a piazza – proved enormously popular, attracting 'an influx of first-time museum-goers, who sat down on the floor'. What were they getting from this artwork, as they picked out their reflections high above? 'Feeling seen,' replies Eliasson, who says that the public's reaction made Tate Modern 'more self-confident' and helped them realise that a museum's activities could have a 'social dimension'. Today, it seems absurd that, as recently as the 1990s, London had no institution to rival the Centre Pompidou in Paris or New York's Museum of Modern Art. Before Serota took over at Tate, its trustees were planning to construct several pavilions, including a 'Museum of 20th Century Art', beside the gallery's 19th-century home (now Tate Britain) on Millbank. 'I felt that the museum, as designated on this plan, was much too small and insignificant,' Serota recalls. By 1992, the trustees agreed: a new, bigger site for Tate's modern art museum had to be found. Six spots were seriously considered, including London's Docklands, Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, King's Cross, Vauxhall, and Battersea Power Station – which, Serota says, 'was regarded as too remote'. In the end, Tate plumped for Giles Gilbert Scott's brick-clad Bankside Power Station, which had closed in 1981 – even though, as Serota recalls, 'large parts of it were derelict: the roof over the Turbine Hall was letting in water significantly.' Yet, he continues, its 'raw space [was] appealing, because, over the past 30 years, artists had increasingly colonised those kinds of spaces in which to show, as well as make, their work.' He also had in mind successfully converted industrial buildings elsewhere, such as a former police garage in Los Angeles that the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry had transformed into 40,000 square feet of exhibition space, which opened in 1983. 'I can remember standing on the other side of the Thames, by St Paul's,' Serota says, 'looking through this slot of space, which is now occupied by the Millennium Bridge, and thinking, 'If this building were in Dusseldorf or Amsterdam, it would already be a museum.'' Its full potential wasn't evident, though, until Tate Modern's Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron, became involved. They were appointed in 1995, following a swift competition (held quickly so that the project could stand a chance of winning funding from the Millennium Commission, which provided £50 million), because of the unique 'brilliance', as Serota puts it, of their proposal: to take out a false floor at ground level, and so 'open the full height of the Turbine Hall to form a single gallery and entrance space', accessed by a ramp. While raising the £135 million that was eventually required to create Tate Modern, Serota was helped by the succès de scandale of the Young British Artists, who captivated the media during the 1990s, and galvanised an apathetic public into getting excited about contemporary art. According to Chris Smith, who, following New Labour's landslide in 1997, became Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and helped to deliver Tate Modern: 'There were grumpy old codgers who were saying, 'I don't know what all this fuss is about: piles of bricks and urinals and slabs of colour daubed on a canvas. This is not real art.' But they were very firmly in the minority.' Nevertheless, Serota recalls that there was 'a lot of controversy' about the presentation of the permanent collection, which adopted a thematic, transnational approach. (Traditionally, museums favour chronological displays, or displays organised by different 'schools' of art, because they help confer coherence on art history's complexities.) In part, Serota concedes, this was a 'tactical' decision. Simply to present a series of displays on a totally chronological basis, beginning in 1900 and ending in 2000, would have meant that we were putting ourselves up against the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou, and there was no contest in terms of the quality of the collection,' he explains. 'Tate has some wonderful things' – The Snail (1953) by Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962) spring to mind – 'but it can't match those other two institutions, in terms of telling a very standard [i.e., European and North American] story.' Since the start, Tate Modern has sought to expand the canon (although Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which Serota co-curated in 2014, attracted more than 562,000 visitors, and was, for many years, its most popular exhibition). Later this year, the gallery will stage an exhibition of work by the Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, as well as an installation, within the Turbine Hall, by Máret Ánne Sara, an indigenous artist from the northern European region of Sápmi. 'This year is quite strong when it comes to indigenous art,' admits Tate Modern's director, Karin Hindsbo who tells me that she is 'working on' restoring Tate Modern's flagging audience (the gallery's visitor figures are still around one-fifth lower than before the pandemic), as well as achieving a 'balanced budget'. 'Obviously, when you have a deficit budget, it's not a sustainable situation,' says Hindsbo, who concedes that there has been a recent 'reduction' in staff numbers at the gallery, although she points out that the process has been 'voluntary'. For Serota, he and his team's work on Tate Modern remains his 'proudest achievement'. He still recalls a time in Britain when, as he puts it, 'modern and contemporary art had never been shown with real conviction, but always with a slight sense of apology, or of trying to connect it with tradition, rather than see it in its own terms… There was a feeling that Britain was a literary rather than a visual culture, and that somehow other people did it better than us.' Yet, he believes, Tate Modern 'forged a new way of thinking about what museums could be', and 'made people feel less frightened by contemporary art, more willing to deal with uncertainty, challenge. So, it has given confidence.' This was certainly the effect it had on me when I was still a student, learning about the art of ancient Greece and Rome. In 2002, I encountered Marsyas, an extruded, 500ft-long red PVC-membrane trumpet by the British sculptor Anish Kapoor, which filled the Turbine Hall like pulsating muscles and organs inside a giant's ribcage; for almost the first time, I felt properly thrilled by an installation created by a living artist. The opening of Tate Modern had a galvanising effect on the wider sector, too – as, for the first time in decades, London (which now boasts many hundreds of galleries) became an important centre internationally for contemporary art. Just as you can't imagine the capital today without, say, the National Theatre, it's impossible to think of a London with no Tate Modern.
