Журнал Andy Warhol's Interview Россия Interview № 4 | Page 176

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making some people very rich. But if that’s why
a person is rich, it’s better if he does not start writ-
ing. Now everything is back to normal, and even
The Rolling Stones are mainly earning money
through concerts.
AD: Apart from music you have tried your hand
at writing.
BG: I will never be a writer. It’s an interesting
pastime, but it’s not for me. Lao Tzu said that the
poet has too many words, and the artist has too
much paint. You need to limit yourself in order to
achieve something. So I limit myself to songs.
AD: What about translation?
BG: And translation.
AD: You are now working on The Bhagavad
Gita. But translation is not a mechanical thing, it is
the lot of many writers. Meanwhile, on the one hand
you work with Buddhist texts, and on the other,
a list of orthodox icons. How do you reconcile these
hypostases?
BG: Hypostases—exactly. The things you listed—
these three make up my work. First: creativity, my
songs. Not music, but songs. Second: journalism,
the radio show “Aerostat”, books about music, gath-
ering information about icons. I was interested in
this already in school: collecting the best and shar-
ing. Every single day for the past seven years I sit at
the computer and write dispatches, because I am
pushed. I’m like a bee—I collect nectar and make
honey from it. I do it purely, how to say...
WIM
WENDERS
p. 176
by OLGA SVIBLOVA
Human perpetual motion machine and perma-
nent director of the Moscow House of Photog-
raphy (now the Multimedia Art Museum, Mos-
cow, or MAMM) Olga Sviblova flew from Bonn,
where she had been to an exhibition of Andy
Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, straight to
Berlin to meet with Wim Wenders. Entering the
famous director’s office, she immediately hand-
ed him a photography book of Russia before the
1917 revolution and promised that he would re-
ceive the second volume upon his arrival to Mos-
cow. Wenders was impressed.
SVIBLOVA: Wim, what interested you first,
cinema or photography?
WENDERS: Hard to separate in my life...You
see, my father was a surgeon, but photography was
his true passion, so his first big gift to me, when
I was seven or eight years old, was a photo camera.
A cheap plastic version of a Rolleiflex. You had to
look in from above, and you needed to load it with
6x6 roll film. All my first pictures were crooked,
and I never got the hang of it. A couple of years
later I got a used SLR camera that you could lift up
to the eyes. I liked that much better. And I already
had my own darkroom at the age of 16 or so. But
cinema entered my life even earlier. One day, my
Dad found a dusty box in the basement that had
survived the war miraculously. It contained a small
hand-cranked 9,5 mm projector and a cigar box full
of a dozen little one-minute films: scenes from
1920s films with Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd
or Buster Keaton. I became the projectionist for all
my friends. None of us had seen movies before!
Television had not yet started in post-war Germa-
ny. I was the first in my neighborhood to project
images, and they could be screened forwards or
backwards, in slow motion or sped-up. I was terri-
bly popular—the lord of the projector! And some-
how that must have had a huge influence on my life,
even if for the next twenty years I did not dream of
becoming a film director. The attraction of my
home movies only faded, when people eventually
started to get televisions. We never had our own
until the Sixties. My father was against it, but
I watched at friend’s houses. So I forgot about the
old projector...
SVIBLOVA: But television—this is far from your
own work, right? This is someone else bombarding
your brain.
WENDERS: That’s true. But at that time you
couldn’t call it “bombardment”. There was only one
channel then, ten years later there were two, and no
one thought that sometime I the future, now!, we
would have the choice of a thousand. I don’t watch
television, though, with the exception of soccer. And
I watch movies on DVD, of course. “Television” has
become an old idea. I think it will die. Finally. And
cinema will outlive it. Thank God!
SVIBLOVA: Yes, right now there are so many
images. Photography is a way to find one’s lost iden-
tity. Photographers take pictures of everything, they
put the camera on a car and making dynamic pan-
oramic shots. But the majority control everything
they do. Cartier-Bresson said: “Photography is the
right moment.” For me, taking pictures (usually on
my telephone) is psychotherapy. What is more im-
portant, to choose an image, leave it, let it survive,
or see it anew?
WENDERS: I think it’s important how you an-
ticipate and “feel” the object of your photography
before you actually record it. The “right moment”
itself is overrated in photography. It’s a subcon-
scious act: you don’t need to tell your hand what to
do, you don’t even need to think about the frame.
The frame appears for me before I even make the
shot. That one and only “right moment” is a clich,
very often. Of course, you can try to catch the right
moment, but if you don’t manage, there will be
a moment before or after it that can be even more
important. Photography is really about the right
state of mind: why the photographer wants to take
a picture, what he expects from it, what he wants to
show the viewer. Each photograph is also partly
a self-portrait.
SVIBLOVA: Usually we feel lost when we’re
afraid, and frequently we’re afraid of what lies
ahead. Does the moment preceding the click of the
camera symbolize our influence on the future?
WENDERS: It’s a little bit funny to talk about
the future in the context of photography. Every
picure really deals with the past—that moment when
it was made. But I agree with you, a photograph has
more of a future than the person who took it. All the
great photographers are dead, but their work is not,
it lives on. Also each photograph contains a sense of
death, but a sense of the future as well. This sounds
all very romantic today, though. It is a pity that
these ideas will be gone with the old generation of
photographers. The age of “photography” as such is
really over. Digital photography is a whole different
thing. I sometimes wonder whether it is correct to
still call the new generation “photographers”. What
they do is not “photography”, it is a different culture
of image-production.
SVIBLOVA: In the future the reality will change,
so now when we discuss the new generation, it
might already be a few steps along the evolution of
human nature. When talking about virtual reality,
we mean life that can turn out more real than real
life. New technology will not only extend our lives,
but will start to clone each of us. Thus the new gen-
eration will have a different sense of the future,
a different sense of time and photography.
WENDERS: I guess that in the future new ideas
of “memory” will have to be developed. The fact
that I can look at photographic negatives that
I made sixty years ago when I was a boy (where
I can see all of my mistakes, all the out-of-focus
frames among all the good frames) is already an ob-
solete idea. In sixty years from now, people will not
be able to see any of the images they made as kids
today. Most digital images taken these days are nev-
er even watched by anybody. The act of taking pho-
tographs is now more important than the pictures
themselves. To look at them carefully, to treasure
them as objects, to create your personal memory...
all of that is no longer fashionable. Humanity overall
is losing their sense of memory. There will be no
more past—only the future.
SVIBLOVA: Many say that memory is the best
recipe for long life, and photographers live for a long
time.
WENDERS (laughs): You think so?
SVIBLOVA: I am looking at the statistics.
I think that if I live a few more years, one wonderful
moment I will find time to write a book, and the
book will consist only of statistics. Let’s look at how
long good photographers live...
WENDERS: Longer than directors or painters?
Maybe painters live longer than all the rest of us?
SVIBLOVA: Photographers! For example, the
genius Cartier-Bresson lived to be 96. I even col-
lected statistics on amateur Soviet photographers
and it was the same. The average life expectancy of
a man in Russia is 56 years.
WENDERS: Hmm, not more? They probably
drink too much vodka! And photographers live ten
years longer?
SVIBLOVA: Compared with the average age,
twenty-five years longer.
WENDERS: Wow! All Russians should become
photographers!
SVIBLOVA: We did an exhibition of Russian
photographers, and there were two 95-year olds
among them. One was very ill, and the second was
the opposite—he drank vodka and smiled at the
young women. 95! There are such statistics around
the world. We collected them in France, Norway,
Russia—the results are the same. Maybe there is
a magic secret to why photographers live so long?
WENDERS: It is a good question—there must be
a good reason. Maybe photographers treasure
“time” more...I have a very good idea: we should
convince collectors that they can live a long life as
well—if only they buy lots of photographs, the magi-
cal abilities of the photographer will transfer to
them. It would be great, right?
SVIBLOVA: Wim, I’m serious. Occasionally
taking photographs—this is better than meditation,
because with a camera you are simultaneously in-
side and outside reality. This is probably what ex-
tends life.
WENDERS: You have a point there. But I’ll tell
you what I think it is. Good photographs are the
product of a person who cares about what he is do-
ing. You care about something dear to you and you
automatically care about others. Such a life will be
extended, I’m sure. People that care only about
themselves die young. In photography you invest
yourself, you lose a part of yourself, but I think that
this is very healthy, like giving blood.
SVIBLOVA: Ten minutes ago we were talking
about photographs that are ready to be taken sub-
consciously. This probably forms a metaphysical
connection between the present day and the future,
between our life and death?
WENDERS: Photographers know more about
death than people of most other professions! This
might rather be unconscious knowledge. You make
a statement about death in every picture you take,
you struggle with death, you describe and confirm
death. I think photographers accept death in life
rather more readily than others. And that makes
them less scared. People that exclude death from
their lives are more easily frightened by it.