His movies may be rambling, and sometimes completely baffling, but for many years Wim Wenders could do no wrong. In the Eighties, when independent cinema had few standard-bearers, he made Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, beautifully shot, meditative movies with their own strange logic, which gained cult status. The Buena Vista Social Club, an exuberant homage to Cuban musicians, proved that he could do more than capture moody landscapes. Then the wheels came off. Don’t Come Knocking, released in April, an elliptical western written by and starring Sam Shepard (who also wrote Paris, Texas), aroused phenomenal critical scorn: “Wenders’s art has dwindled into complacency and self-absorption”; “Wenders at his worst: slow, self-indulgent, pretentious”.

Given this barrage of brickbats, it’s not surprising that Wenders is taking a year off, although he puts it down to needing a rest. In an exclusive interview, as the first full exhibition of his photography in Europe opens in Rome, he claims to be surprised at the critics’ vitriol. “I just don’t understand it. As far as I’m concerned I’m making the best films of my life,” he insists.

Just like his films, Wenders, 60, expresses himself slowly and gravely. Sentences unspool at a snail’s pace, although sporadically a playfulness breaks through. He’s a storyteller, he says, and the landscapes that obsess him reveal stories to him too. This may sound esoteric, a little barking even, but Wenders waits for these locations to divulge their secrets “in the right light at the right time”. His true profession he says, “is a traveller, not film-maker or photographer”.

The pictures, many taken on a special Fuji panoramic camera, echo his movies — indeed lots were taken while he scouted locations. They are incredibly beautiful and have a loaded stillness to them. For those who find his movies ponderous they have the advantage that you can walk away from them. Roads disappear into the horizon; buses are freakishly adorned with names (Paul, Luke and Noah) parked together in a row; derelict shop fronts hint at Hopper; empty towns are peppered with skeletal telegraph poles. His favourite, The Road to Emmaus, of a stony path running through mountains outside Jerusalem, was taken when he walked westwards at dusk, “knowing beforehand the place would find me, it felt like I was stepping back 2,000 years”. Rarely do people figure in the shots. “My films are about people, characters,” Wenders says, “but at the beginning I always start with a place, to give their emotions and actions a context. Then the story takes over. With my photography I can finally do justice to these places.” One image shows the shadowy reception of an old Arizona hotel: brightly coloured leather chairs sit unoccupied beneath a faded painting of a desert. “I can see all the people sitting on those chairs,” he says. “Pictures reveal more about people if they’re not in them.”

Wenders was given his first camera when he was 6 by an aunt, “a strange, clunky thing that you looked down into so you held it at your navel. It was so special. This was long before our image-driven culture. I took particularly strange pictures of animals at the zoo”. Before he got his own darkroom he used the family bathroom: “No one could go to the toilet.”

He wanted to become a painter. At 12, in an early sign of his future obsession with travel, he cycled 100km to Amsterdam to see Vermeers, Rembrandts and Van Goghs. “I went to every museum I could. As a kid you have a much larger capacity to learn — about shadows, lighting, framing.” Caspar David Friedrich was a favourite: “He always painted at twilight which is also the best light for photographs. He captured tiny figures in his pictures, who are spoken for by the landscape around them.”

His father, a surgeon, loved photography, though he had abandoned it for his medical career, and had a Leica that he gave to Wenders when he was 16. “I studied medicine for three semesters,” Wenders says. “I had to gather all my courage to tell my father it wasn’t for me. I was thinking the whole world would fall apart but he started to laugh.”

“I knew from the beginning you weren’t going to continue with it,” his father told him. “But you had to find out for yourself. What do you want to be instead?” “A painter,” Wenders told him.

“His jaw dropped,” Wenders recalls. “He was expecting me to pursue more regular study. He was OK later. Fortunately my brother is a radiologist.”

Like Friedrich, Wenders says he is a “hopeless romantic” and went to Paris to fulfil his ambition. He had a tiny room that was so cold he slept in his clothes. “I did all I could to avoid it. That’s how I discovered cinema. You could see a film for one franc and then hang around in the corridors and see five in a row. Before I knew it I was hooked.” From there he went to film school in Munich, became a critic, then a film-maker. It was only when he won the Palme d’Or for Paris, Texas that his mother accepted his career.

“If I had been around 150 years ago I would have been one of those travellers who made etchings,” Wenders says. “Even though we live in a well-travelled world, there are still enough places where people don’t go: undiscovered, unnoticed, on the wayside. I think they have such a rich wealth of stories to tell. You just have to wait for them to reveal themselves.”

Wenders always has music with him. “I have 14 days’ worth on my iPod. Music provides continuity for me. I currently love African music, but there is also Bach, Thomas Tallis, world music, rock and roll, the blues.”

In one room of the exhibition is a set of photographs taken at Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the twin towers. Wenders was smuggled on to the site as assistant to Joel Meyerowitz, the official disaster photographer. “Like a lot of people, the images on TV invaded all of my dreams and consciousness,” he says. “As a kid I had a recurring dream of collapsing towers. I would be in one and just when it fell I would wake up. Those dreams came back.”