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Felipe Hernández Cava
Some of the visions most committed to the modern project -for despite its shifting sands, Wender's has become just this- are concerned by the progressive weakening of those discourses that tried to articulate the totality of the relationships we maintain with reality. Today, amidst increasing image noise, such visions seem to us somewhat forsaken and lacking a framework to refer to when searching for the slightest hint of meaning. They cling to an adherence to a few solid, although sometimes contradictory links, in fear of perishing in the erratic postmodern fragmentation. These are basically the visions of those who believe that not only is it wrong to consider modernity finished, but that what we are living today is nothing more than another one of its eras, although, in fact, quite a troubled one.
I believe that those who wager on those visions refuse to accept all the rules of the farce we are immersed in, this perhaps being the only certainty we can count on. But they cannot be denied their status as resisters in these times when it is not even easy to ponder the essence of the image, perturbed not only by its saturation but also by the dislocation it is being subjected to. Mostly from the advertising field, there comes an endless generation of thousands of images which are increasingly opaque however seductive they appear after undergoing the corresponding manipulation carried out by professionals. Professionals who, as Wenders have occasionally pointed out, make a show of the condescending audacity to consider that nothing are good enough to do without revaluation. The German filmmaker and photographer, like other lucid members of his generation, that which wanted to subvert the order of things, has always maintained an untrusting relationship with our overpopulated iconosphere. He has found a myriad of overabundant images that could be labelled "impure", not so much owing to their high level of contamination, but rather to the fact that they no longer attempted even to show us what was reflected within them. So great is the degree of divorce between what most images apparently mean per se and what they end up meaning, that the only thing they achieve is to extend the void before our eyes and strip the objects of interest by emptying them of existence. Dead images that do not portray, that are merely eloquent aspects of a thought boasting about its erratic wanderings. How then does one restore the 'purity' of the images? Or, what amounts to the same thing, how does one restore their meaningful capacity, allowing them, as much as possible, to grant the photographer his authorization to explain them? In this utopian project, so interconnected with meditations on modernity, there is no choice but to retrace the steps taken so far and return to origins free of many of the current burdens. To my understanding, it is the same path as that taken by several graphic designers and painters. A path which, in short, is mapped by nothing more and nothing less than a desire to disassemble the current visual device, to stop seeing like machines, like automatons. (…)
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