An obsessive Polaroid photographer: Wim Wenders

From the late 60s until the early 80s, Wenders took around 12,000 snapshots with his Polaroid camera and gave most of them away. The remaining 3,500 were stored in old cigar boxes for decades. The Polaroid was big, clumsy and hard to focus, but you didn't have to take the film somewhere to have it developed. The pictures developed on their own — as if by magic.

Anyone who recalls 1970s America will see a world forever gone in these snapshots. They document a time, to quote the 72-year-old filmmaker, when "there was no sadness, no anger, there was nothing but sheer innocence, not only my own, but everyone around me."

Since Wenders usually gave little attention to the quality of his Polaroid photos, they seem all the more authentic. "If ever I had wanted to really take a picture of something, I would not have done it with a Polaroid," he said. Instead, it was a way to easily capture a fleeting moment.

In 1973 he met a tall young woman by chance in a nightclub in New York. Seeing that he was lonely, she told him to call her should he find himself alone in San Francisco. A week later, he did. Thus began Wenders' friendship with the young music photographer Annie Leibovitz, who took him along on a road trip to Los Angeles.

Perhaps every aging person grows melancholy recalling his youth. With Wenders, it was the 1970s and 80s. "I don't think I'm romanticizing when I allege that Polaroids were the last outburst of a time when we had certainty, not only in images. We had nothing but confidence in things, period."

When the news of John Lennon's assassination came, Wenders was on a Los Angeles freeway. "I pulled over and sat there and wept until there were no more tears left." Catching the next flight to New York, he soon found himself in the midst of thousands at a silent vigil in front of Lennon's house. "We had all lost something essential. For me, it was my childhood, my youth."

In Wenders' film "The American Friend," the late actor Dennis Hopper repeatedly takes snapshots of himself with a Polaroid. Hopper himself was a recognized photographer. Did the two trade notes? "Not really," says Wenders. "We made a film in which his character talks about photography a lot. But for Dennis, photography was a thing of the past."

Wim Wenders embarked on his project "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" in the 1980s, crisscrossing the globe and capturing images from countries like Australia, Cuba, Israel, Japan and the USA. They include many quiet, lonely landscapes and desolate scenes: a desert, an empty hotel lobby — or here, a road on the outskirts of a community in northeastern Germany named Welt (World).

Just like vinyl records, Polaroid film cameras have made a comeback, appealing to those who like the charm of this old analogue technology. Part of the fun are the few minutes of anticipation until the picture is ready. The colors can vary depending on the type of film and the temperature. With their vague contours and blend of colors, the pictures seemed veiled in a feeling of nostalgia.

Wenders has compared photography to "watching death at work," with the characteristics of a photo inevitably changing, fading or one day ceasing to exist altogether — like memories themselves, perhaps. The exhibition "Wim Wenders: Instant Stories" is on show at the C/O Berlin museum from July 7 through September 23.