Wim Wenders’ dreamy Polaroid collection is coming to London

A new exhibition on Wim Wenders – the cult director behind Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and Alice In The Cities – is coming to London’s Photographers Gallery this October.

The show, titled Instant Stories, will focus on the filmmaker’s previously unseen Polaroid work – with over 200 of his personal photographs set to go on display. According to the gallery, this will include candid shots of cast and crew, friends and family, still-lives, street-photography and landscapes. All of the images selected were taken between the early 1970s and mid ’80s.

Over his 50-year career, Wenders has become just as famed for his photography as his filmmaking, with the director using the medium as a way of testing out frames and ideas. He ended up taking thousands – using them as a visual diary to document his travels throughout Europe and the US.

Wim Wenders Sydney, 1984 © Wim Wenders. Courtesy of the artist

Speaking about his love of Polaroids in an accompanying book for the exhibition, Wenders says: “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.”

Instant Stories: Wim Wenders’ Polaroids will run at London’s Photographer’s Gallery from October 20th to February 11th 2018. 

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