Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders is one of the most admired film directors of our time. Through his films, he has received numerous prestigious awards and gained international recognition. But he is also renowned for his photographs, which have been shown in many exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Wenders has admitted that he played with cameras from a very young age, but it was only during the preparation of his first films that his curiosity was truly awakened. His photographs are therefore highly revealing of the creative process behind all the films he made during the prolific period of the 1970s and 1980s. The son of a surgeon, Wim Wenders was born in August 1945 in Düsseldorf, Germany. After completing secondary school in Oberhausen, he began studying medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and later in Düsseldorf. In 1965, he interrupted his university studies and decided to become a painter. He moved to Paris in October 1966 and worked as an engraver in the studio of the German artist Johnny Friedlander in Montparnasse. In 1967, Wenders returned to Germany and enrolled at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film (University of Television and Film) in Munich. In 1971, he co-founded a production and distribution cooperative called Filmverlag der Autoren. As one of its most influential members, this structure—with Wenders—became a core nucleus of the New German Cinema. In 1975, he also founded his own production company, Road Movies. In 1984, he became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He received honorary doctorates from the University of the Sorbonne in Paris (1989), the Faculty of Theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland (1995), and the University of Louvain (2005). Between 1993 and 1999, he taught at the HFF in Munich, the film school where he had himself studied. Since 2003, he has taught at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HfbK). He is President of the European Film Academy and was elected to the order Pour le Mérite. A major retrospective exhibition of his photographs, Pictures from the Surface of the Earth, has been shown since 2001 in museums and art institutions around the world. Wim Wenders has also published numerous books of essays and photography. He lives in Berlin with his wife, the photographer Donata Wenders.