Wim Wenders, 'Places, strange and quiet'

Wim Wenders is one of my favourite filmmakers. If you havn't seen any of his work, borrow 'Paris,Texas' or 'Wings of Desire' from the library. Especially borrow 'Wings of Desire' if you have just been to Berlin. He has just had an exhibition of photographs called 'Places, strange and quiet' at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London. His photographs range from little black and white Polaroids, displayed on tiny easels in glass cases, to huge panoramic images, often shown in groups of three, like frames from a film, with a definite cinematic feel to them.

He says:
"When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don't know them and have never been there ...I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that's where it's interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don't know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange."

The Haunch of Venison gallery is in a huge, lovely old building at the back of the Royal Academy that used to house the Museum of Mankind, a regular haunt of mine when I was a student at the Central School of Art and Design in the '80s. It seems to specialize in work that is about a sense of place, and the bookshop has a great selection of catalogues and artist's books. It's a good place to visit when you are in London, and it's free.