Photographic images and their ambivalent status in Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas

This paper analyzes two films by Wim Wenders—Alice in the Cities (1974) and Paris, Texas (1984)—which might be viewed, both narratively and stylistically, as a powerful reflection on photography. Drawing on theories by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, William J. Mitchell, and Roger Scruton, the essay provides frameworks for understanding Wenders’s commentary on photography and visual media. While both films recognize photography’s evidential power—its transparent, unbiased representation of what Barthes calls the photographic referent—they also show nostalgia for unmediated experience and criticize how photography changes human perception. The analysis shows how cameras and other technological “extensions” in Wenders’s films limit creative expression and reduce ability for “pure handcraft” (more authentic human expressions like writing). Live communication serves as a counterpoint to camera-mediated experience, helping the main characters overcome their ennui—or what Freud would classify as melancholia.