The acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders has created an exclusive photo edition for Monopol, now available through WhiteWall.
The cinema is called “State”. It is closed – who knows for how long. A symbolic image that captures the present-day United States while at the same time echoing Wim Wenders’ iconic American imagery of the 1980s. This is the new photo edition that Wenders is releasing in the year of his 80th birthday, exclusively in collaboration with Monopol magazine.
Wenders took this photograph in Texas, not far from where he began shooting his masterpiece Paris, Texas 40 years ago. As he recalls, filming at the time began at Devil’s Playground, a remote rock formation in Big Bend, Texas. Now he set out to return: a journey of several days by car from El Paso along Interstate 10 East to Van Horn, then continuing on Route 90 South to the small town of Marathon, and from there via Highway 385 South to Terlingua, before heading further off-road.
“I was completely exhausted on that drive,” Wenders says, “I was mostly asleep. And when we stopped somewhere – God knows where – because someone felt unwell, I woke up, grabbed my camera for some reason and wandered away from the car, still half asleep. Who knows where it was. Then there was a junction with a disused road, where no one had driven for ages, judging by the grass growing through the asphalt. I just kept walking along it, and suddenly I found myself standing in front of this long-abandoned movie theatre called ‘State’. Nothing around it. Less than nothing. That’s where I took this photograph.”
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Photography has long been an integral part of Wenders’ artistic practice, whose internationally celebrated work is currently on view in the major retrospective “W.I.M. The Art of Seeing” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.
The edition “‘State’, Texas” is produced in a format of 60 × 45 cm as a photographic print mounted behind glossy acrylic glass, produced by WhiteWall. The works are mounted on aluminium Dibond and framed in a 50 mm deep white aluminium ArtBox. The edition is limited to 100 copies plus five artist’s proofs. The price per work is €790 including VAT, plus shipping. The edition is available in Germany only