— They do work as a contrast, and the origin is simply that Aeneas Bastian suggested an exhibition this year, that I am turning 80, and he said “But I’d like to show recent photographs”, and recent in this case meant stuff I hadn’t printed yet. I had been to China a few years ago, but this was before the pandemic, and I had taken the pictures in order to make an exhibition. But then China was closed afterwards for years, along with all galleries and museums. So, I never had this exhibition of my pictures from China. I had almost forgotten them myself. So, I said to Aeneas, “I took a whole series of photos for four weeks in China, I can show them to you, I never did anything with them. And then, recently, I have taken a lot of pictures in the forest.” Aeneas wanted to see them, so I showed him those forest pictures and he liked them. And then I showed him the unknown series of China, because in the end we had never shown them to anybody.

So, he liked them both, he also saw other recent pictures, but he got stuck on the pictures in the forest and in China, and he liked that they sort of worked as complementary, they are indeed very different. The pictures in the forest are very silent and clandestine, and the pictures in China are very public.

— There are many people, many people with phones.

— A lot of people, yeah, and he said “I think it would be great if we can separate them, have the forest pictures in the first room and fill the interior room with your China's pictures”. He loved the idea that it would be almost two different sounds, two soundscapes, and I liked the idea too, and that you see the forest first, and then you enter into the buzzy world of contemporary China. So, that's how it happened, and of course you think all sorts of complex thoughts into that, but you don't have to.

— We feel like your work is a lot about journeys, both metaphorical and practical. You traveled a lot and worked in many different countries, USA and Japan for example. What do you think that your eye as an “outsider” – in the sense of a person portraying a country he wasn’t born in – add to your view of these places and to your movies and photographs?

— In this particular case, I had been to China before, a long time ago, and I hadn’t been back for an eternity, and when I had the possibility to travel to China in 2019 – for weeks all across China – I thought it would be quite interesting to discover both the countryside and the cities. I really wanted to make large panoramic photographs, like I have done in America or in Australia or in other parts of the world, like Japan, and when I came to China, I realized I couldn’t do the kind of photographs I wanted to do, because I was not the only one who wanted to photograph China. Wherever I went, there were already thousands of people! These were strictly the Chinese themselves, and they felt even more like foreigners there than me. It felt like the Chinese were visiting Mars or the Moon, because even if they all had travelled to destinations in their own country they looked around mesmerized: “Is this really our country, are we really living here?”

To me, all these Chinese tourists I encountered looked like visitors in their own country, taking pictures in order to make sure that they were really there, that it was actually their country, and to reassure themselves that they had the right to be there. They were discovering their country, it felt to me, as if they had been too busy in the last 20 or so years working on it and making it happen, and now they all stood there, like “Oh look at it, this is China now!”

I was really touched by their curiosity and insecurity to accept this as their country. So, I started to take pictures of the Chinese taking pictures of their country, instead of photographing empty landscapes, as always. I had never done that before, but I started to like it, because photography itself also became the subject and it was an encounter with the Chinese people, although I didn't take any single portrait or I didn't really become friends with any of these people.

But it felt like I was there at a very privileged moment, in which for the first time they had come to a stop in order to look around. At least that's how it felt. So, for the first time I took lots of pictures with mostly a lot of people in them. Sometimes the picture that I was taking was one of a hundred pictures taken at the very same moment, by hundreds of people. And I tell you: that is a very different feeling! Normally, in all my photographs, I wait until everybody is gone, if there are people in the shot. I wait a lot, sometimes I have to wait the whole day until I can take a picture of a place alone, and until I feel I have earned the right to take it and this is the right moment. In China was the opposite: there were a hundred people taking pictures together with me, and I took a picture of them taking pictures. I was on a different mission, so to speak.

— About the medium of photography, you always used it in parallel with your career as a director, taking polaroids at the beginning for example. How is your relationship with the medium? How has it changed, from the polaroids to digital photography to now phones and so on?

— It has been an amazing journey from the little boy who got his first camera in 1951. It was a 6 by 6 plastic camera, and you had to look from the top, do you remember those cameras? But it was a cheap one and fixed focus and you couldn’t do much with it, and I really didn’t like looking down, away from the subject. I felt like you have to look ahead at something and lift the camera up to your eyes, but looking down separated you. Finally, I took all my courage and told my dad that I loved my camera, but it was not good for me because I wanted to lift it to the eye, and not look down. So, we changed the camera, he understood, and I got another camera and then I liked it so much more. Photography was a great discovery! I had not seen many photographs, except in magazines or in books, but I had never seen a print. So, I felt that photography was something that existed only in newspapers or books.

Discovering that it was something that I could actually do myself, and learning about it was a great lesson in my life, to produce them and make them and get a sense of what framing was all about, get a sense of what you liked seeing and what you liked taking, and how it was linked to the film stock and to the technical abilities of your camera. Then I got another camera, and I started to understand about focus and aperture and speed and all of that. And eventually I had a dark room when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, making my own prints. It is such an intense way to learn how to deal with the world if you learn how to take a picture. How a photograph is something that repeats a moment that only happened once but then the picture is there forever! 

Then going on and discovering instant photography, polaroids, then colour, large format photography, digital photography, iPhones… It’s all photography in a way, at least we still call it all photography, although I sometimes feel what we take with our smartphones is certainly not a photograph. It’s a different proof, a different obsession, a different approach and a different mindset. What I do with this thing, other than what I do it with a camera, is more about me and my smartphone than about the world. This picture I just took of the two bottles is not so much about the two bottles, it's about the idea that this thing can do it. And this thing can do everything. It can do anything, it's an extension of myself. Photography was a different idea, at the beginning. Photography was about the world, was about these two bottles, and not about the thing that can do anything.

So yeah, I mean, we should invent a different word for the photos we take with our smartphones, yet we still call it photography. It was a long journey over 80 years, a long discovery, a long relationship with the world and a long relationship with the idea of the image, and what it adds towards preserving things, places and people.

— What we are also curious about is, compared to movies – since you are both a photographer and a director – what does stillness add or take off, like what's the difference when you take a photograph, does stillness add anything or does it affect your vision?

— If we’re still talking about this “thing” here, in the end, it is not about stillness, this thing can do it all anyway. I can also film the two bottles – well, not a film like in making movies. In the end, stillness is not the issue for me. For me the issue is storytelling! Two bottles, if they are standing on the table are one thing, but becoming part of the story, like pouring the water into a glass and giving it to you, or pushing it so that it gets your dress wet, that would be the beginning of a story, and that would be something very different.

So, the still image or the moving image - while you can philosophize a lot about it, but the difference is if there is a story or not. I am a storyteller, and a story is something that is present in each photograph, and in each moving image. But the filmmaker adds something, invents something, which the photographer does not.  When I started taking pictures I didn’t begin by being a storyteller at the same time. I took pictures, and taking pictures led to my desire of becoming a painter, that's all I ever wanted for the first 22 years of my life, being a painter. A storyteller is the opposite of a painter.

The real still image is not the photograph, it is the painting of the two bottles. The story that starts by pouring a glass of water for you, that would be the possible beginning of a film. But it's two different professions, storyteller or picture maker.

— What is your relationship with Berlin? You are certainly known for your beautiful portraits of the city with some of your iconic movies, like The Wings of Desire. What is your relationship with the city? Would you like to portray it again in the future or are you planning to do that?

— I was happy that I was able to capture Berlin at a moment when it was unique, and that there is a film now called Wings of Desire which is a document of a city that no longer exists, of a country that no longer exists. I am very much attracted to cities, and making movies about cities, and I gave a lot of my films even the name of cities. But after portraying Berlin two or three times, I have moved on to Lisbon, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Los Angeles. I am attracted to cities, but making a movie is a very intimate way to get to know it, and once I know a city, I’m not sure I want to make another movie there. Unless the city has changed a lot, like Berlin did.