Onomichi, really

[...]

The Japan I perceive through my camera
is strictly my very own sight.
(Or "insight"?)
It is shaped by the history of Japanese Cinema,
(that I got to know in Paris and New York,
long before I ever set foot in Japan for the first time,)
but also by Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer and Hopper,
by Walker Evans, Sebastião Salgado and Joel Meyerowitz,
by Van Morrison, Dylan and Lou Reed,
by Peter Handke, Walker Percy and Bruce Chatwin
by my wife's black and white photography
and by everything else I ever saw, read, heard and loved.

Sometimes I don't have a clue anymore
how to retrace, let alone explain the complexity
of even the simplest thing,
or the history of its influences...

But I can promise you
that the world you see in the pictures of this exhibition
is not digitally reconstructed.
I did not intend to show you things that do not exist in Onomichi.
Everything is "real",
if you allow me to use this somehow obsolete word, for once.
Well, what your eyes see, in my images,
and how and through what grid,
that again is your very own picture story (or history).


Trecho de texto Onomichi, really de Wim Wenders no livro Journey to Onomichi

OBS- ele está em alemão também, como foi primeiramente escrito mas como não sei alemão eu reproduzi a tradução em inglês.