"You're always manipulating," said Wim Wenders, a German-born director and photographer. "Even in documentaries."

Photography, on the other hand, has "a link to truth and reality. ... A negative is something holy," he said.

"I've learned to dissociate the two professions."

Yet Wenders' two careers merged in his 1984 masterwork "Paris, Texas." The film winds through the small towns and desolate interstate between Texas and California, places he had never visited before.

But the mythology of the area had always fascinated him. He was weaned on cowboy movies and the American Old West novels of Karl May.

Filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders

Before production, Wenders said he spent "three months zigzagging the American West, taking thousands of pictures."

He was struck by the light and how it made every color "simple, primary, and brilliant." No color correction required.

"You think that this blue only exists in photographs, but it exists there, and it's real," he said. "And there's always these little white clouds there, as if they're painted into it. But they're for real."

Wenders, traveling alone and focusing his lens mostly on abandoned places, developed an intimacy with the West.

"There's something about road trips. ... To be on the road," he said, "is a state of grace. ... Your perception is more acute."

The West that Wenders discovered was vast, desolate and mysterious. His photographs read as though they're from any post-war decade. This is flyover country, filled with forgotten places.

From this setting emerges Travis Henderson, the catatonic main character of "Paris, Texas" found wandering the desert in the film's first scene. Travis seems like a part of the environment's natural fauna, a character as impenetrable as his surroundings.

The enigma surrounding his past -- and future -- drives the film's narrative through many of the dusty roads visited by Wenders.

"Paris, Texas" won the 1984 Palme d'Or, the Cannes Film Festival's top honor. Years later, the photographs Wenders took in advance of the film were organized into a collection, "Written in The West."

Wenders, a self-proclaimed addict of "jukebox culture," often focused his lens on signs and advertisements.

"The sign culture in America is really, for me, one of the most important parts of American art," he said. "Pop art, Warhol, they lived on that."

The signs he photographed often bring a sense of irony to his work.

"Sometimes you see signs for a restaurant 400 miles in advance ... and then you come to the restaurant and it's just a dinky little place," he said. "But the signs preparing you for it were beautiful."

Decayed and faded signs, meanwhile, expose traces of grand ambitions gone awry -- one of the defining elements of the mythology surrounding the American West.

An advertisement for the future site of Western World, which echoes a location in the film, stands before a vast, undeveloped lot. Wenders returned to that sign four times over the years until it was removed.

"A lot of plans collapsed, and hopes collapsed -- and the American West, the landscape of the American West, took it back."

Wim Wenders is a German filmmaker and photographer. You can like him on Facebook.