Splinters

Memento Mori

I have been reading Wim Wenders' stunning book Once. In these short photo stories this film maker tries to get inside what makes a photo more than just a moment in time for us. Through these short written recollections, all starting from the personal "Once I...." he recounts why he took the sequence of photographs. Wenders skillfully turns would could easily be nothing more than pithy showbiz anecdotes into so much more.

What I found amazing was how what are essentially snapshots become vivid portrayals of urban life or glimpses of the surreal nature of everyday life in his hands

However, the images that really stood out for me were his photographs of other directors like Jean Luc Godard, Martin Scorcese with Isabella Rosellini in the Californian deserts, or his sequence of images from his 'day out' with the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and Francis Coppola. One of these image shows the frail Kurosawa trapped at the edge of the photo. Here he is sat upright in a directors chair in the shadows watching the bear-like Coppola and friends larking around as they swim in a creek. A strange image, I looked at it for ages trying to work out what captivated me about it. I came to the conclusion it was the way it tells us so much about each man. Wenders' camera has some how peeled away any veneer of fame, leaving us the essence of these image makers half glimpsed in the brevity of it's eye. It's the something that the camera finds in the nothingness of an infinite number of possible images.

I found this book hard to track down in the UK, but if you can find it, I can assure you its worth the effort.