Is Photography Dead?

By Peter Plagens

摄影已死？

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions. In "Depth of Field"— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

这怎么可能呢？这种媒介看起来当然生机勃勃、发展良好，如果有什么问题的话，就是从业者过多。成群的摄影人忙乎着，手里拿着返璞归真的针孔相机，照片像素以千兆计，用手机拍摄街头照片，宏大的照片拍摄场面，其工作团队、复杂程度以及费用成本与电影片场相差无几。走入位于切尔西、圣莫尼卡或伦敦西区几乎所有的严肃艺术馆，映入眼帘的很可能是令人惊诧不已的巨幅彩色照片，像安德列·格费勒用数码技术将数千张单幅照片组合而成的停车场俯瞰图，迪迪埃·马萨德表现风景变幻的纯粹“编导式照片”。在正在进行的两个博物馆展览上，策展方对摄影的认可态度已经耳目一新。在纽约大都会艺术博物馆新当代摄影展览馆首次举办的艺术展“景深”上，门票费包括参观托马斯•施特鲁斯那幅苛求细节的表现威尼斯圣萨卡利亚教堂内部的彩色照片和亚当·弗斯的一张浮在水上的相纸与水花和频闪闪光灯同步曝光的照片。该展览一直持续到3月23日。

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978" (up through Dec. 31) celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect.

在位于华盛顿美国国家美术馆，“美国快照艺术展，1888—1978”（12月31日结束）展出了普通美国人用布朗尼相机和傻瓜照相机拍出的惊人效果。

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

可是，漫步于这两个展览的展区，总教人不由地想知道，整个摄影是否尚未自毁到面目全非的地步。雕塑曾有过先例，以至于如今的“雕塑”意味着地上挖个坑就可以轻易地成为一尊铜像。数字化造就了大量各色各样的艺术摄影。但也正是这一主要原因，在数字技术颠覆了摄影功能与概念的25年后，摄影似乎已失去了自己的灵魂。胶片摄影的艺术威望一度在于，不管唬人的暗室多大程度上对照片进行了添加修补，从根本上说，照片所记录的还是相机前发生的真实情景。相反，数码照片则可能是Photoshop软件制造的虚幻，只有现实细小碎片的一抹痕迹而已。到目前，我们已目睹了所有神奇的图像变形，看到了所有巧妙的手法，它们将众多曾经倡导真实的摄影人变成制造假象的魔术师。很难再让人啧啧称奇。

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form. Talbot wanted only to be able to "draw" more accurately than by hand. In fact, he called his first book of reproduced photographs "The Pencil of Nature." For at least a century thereafter, any photograph with a claim to being art had in its DNA at least a few chromosomes from Talbot's "The Open Door" (1844), a picture of a tree-branch broom leaning just-so-esthetically against a dark doorway. Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art." Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings.

艺术与真实曾是挚友。现代主义出现之前，西方艺术中最受推崇之处是模拟——绘画和雕塑的对象与现实生活的实物极其相像。1839年 威廉 · 亨利 ·福克斯 · 塔尔博特 用一张负片冲印出第一批照相图片，他 立刻将这个以模拟见长的新媒介视为一种艺术形式。塔尔博特 只是想 能够 “ 画 ” 得比手更为精确。事实上，他把自己第一本画册称为《自然的画笔》。在此后的至少一个世纪里，任何 自 称为艺术的照片 的DNA中都在一定程度上带有 塔尔博特 《 敞开 的 门 》 （1844年） 的染色体 ， 在这张照片上， 一把树枝做成的扫帚 非常艺术 地倚在黑 洞洞 的门口。当然，伟大的摄影师 绝非 像法庭速记员记录证词一样 ，只是不加选择 地纪录所见事实。他们认真选择拍摄对象，精心构图，赋予画面以“艺术”之感。19世纪后期， “ 绘画派 ” 摄影师运用柔焦、 多齿相纸、棕褐色调、多底合成，甚至 划刻底片，来让照片看上去更像一幅画。

Soon, photography escaped the exclusive grasp of the professionals and moneyed hobbyists who could afford its cumbersome equipment, and the public began to take its own pictures. In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. To be sure, some masterpieces did emerge—mostly accidentally—from this Everest-size heap of images. The person who pointed his Brownie at the woman in "Unknown [photographer], 1950s" in "The Art of the American Snapshot" probably didn't anticipate that she'd cover her face with her hands just as he clicked the shutter. And he (or she) couldn't predict that the result would be a great composition—long fingers and angular elbows set against the gentle downhill sweep of a field—and a wonderful metaphor for photography's tango with the truth. What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and '40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and '60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing.

不久，摄影就不再为专业人士和买得起笨重设备的富裕爱好者所独享，公众开始自己拍摄照片。20世纪20年代，柯达布朗尼等体积小巧、价格便宜的快门照相机问世。到1950年，根据柯达公司的统计，近四分之三的美国家庭拥有照相机，拍摄照片达20亿张。到20世纪70年代，美国人一年拍摄的照片就达90亿张，大多数是简单随意的快照。当然，在这珠穆朗玛峰般的照片堆里也出现了一些佳作——大部分属偶然天成。在“美国快照艺术展”上展出的“佚名[摄影师]，20世纪50年代”，把布朗尼相机对准一名妇女的那个人可能没有想到，就在他按下快门的那一瞬她会用双手挡住脸部。他（或她）都无法预料到，其结果会是一幅力作——长长的手指和瘦削的肘部与田地柔和的下斜曲线形成鲜明对比——成为摄影与现实之间步调合拍的绝佳隐喻。这幅不经意间拍摄的佳作与现实主义摄影艺术家们的作品相比，如二十世纪30、40年代的朵洛西亚·蓝吉、沃克-埃文斯和二十世纪50、60年代的黛安·阿勃丝、罗伯特·弗兰克，他们的共同之处在于作品中的人物是什么样就是什么样——骨瘦如柴的农民、表情坚毅的矿工、疲惫不堪的主妇、身材魁梧的自行车运动员——都以原原本本的行为和形象出现。

In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. "The big change in attitude from realist photography," says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, "was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980." Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake "film stills" with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable.

然而，二十世纪70年代末，摄影的虚构观念日渐出现后现代主义倾向。在纽约开设著名画廊的劳伦斯·米勒说：“现实主义摄影在态度上的显著变化始于1980年大都会画廊（苏荷区最时髦的画廊之一）展出辛蒂·雪曼的作品。”雪曼的虚构自拍照——即假“电影剧照”，照片上艺术家在床上装扮成衣冠不整的金发碧眼女郎，或高雅公寓里的黑发荡妇——并非是摄影第一次转离大多数人视为真正摄影的纯粹的、写实性新闻报道。但是她的照片将摄影视为艺术，代表了一种新的境界。它不再仅仅是为了新闻报道。塔尔博特的美学之门向摄影人完全敞开，他们既拍摄照片，也制作照片。数码技术的出现只是进一步将摄影推入了虚构的境地。

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's extension. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

我们生活在一个被像素主宰的社会，日益脱离物质现实。电影充斥着电脑制作的图像，在《贝奥武夫》这样的“表演动画”电影里，甚至盖过了一切。一些成功的流行金曲都经过了电脑处理，如果你知道对方的分机号码，歌手还不如告诉你按1键收听即可。甚至雕塑都采用了数码“快速成型”技术，可以将程序员想像出的任何东西转化成3-D塑料体。摄影为什么应该与众不同呢？为什么摄影不能屈服于数码的诱惑，使每一幅风景照片都犹如宇宙史上绝无仅有的美图，或者将城市的每一个角落都变成高楼林立的幻影？

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

摄影终于要摆脱对镜头前拍摄对象的依靠，但付出的代价是失去摄影作为根植于现实的“证据”吸引观众注意力的特有魅力。作为画廊的工具，如今的照片本质上与完全源自画家想象的画作没有区别，除了它们没有绘画的手工笔法和画布表面的变化。现代伟大的摄影师莉赛特·莫德尔曾说过：“摄影是最简单的艺术，也许因此也是最难的艺术。”她不知道奇异效果会变得多么容易，而且这又使得在同一画面里抓取到美与真会有多么困难。未来的伟大摄影家——如果有的话——必须找到一个办法，使摄影重新找回与现实的特有联系。他们必须用一种全新的方法实现它。

                                                         ——译自Newsweek  Dec.10, 2007

英国摄影师拍摄的阿富汗战争照片荣获大奖

A British photographer has scooped the top prize at the prestigious World Press Photo awards for his image of a US soldier collapsing with exhaustion after fighting militants in Afghanistan.

一名英国摄影师摘取了闻名的世界新闻摄影比赛最高奖，其照片展现的是一名美军士兵与阿富汗与武装人员激战后，精疲力竭地瘫倒着的情景。

Tim Hetherington’s picture of a US soldier resting in a bunker after an intense fire-fight was lauded by judges in Amsterdam, who said it was an image which communicated "the exhaustion of a nation."

蒂姆·赫瑟林顿拍摄的这幅美军士兵在猛烈交火后在掩体内休息的照片在阿姆斯特丹受到评委们的好评，他们认为，这幅照片体现了“一个国家的疲惫”。

The award, which Mr Hetherington, 37, won while working for Vanity Fair magazine, is considered one of the greatest distinctions a photojournalist can achieve.

现年37岁的赫瑟林顿供职于《名利场》杂志，他所荣获的这一奖项被认为是摄影记者所能获得的最高殊荣之一。

The winning photograph depicts the soldier collapsing against a bunker wall, one hand held to his eyes and the other clutching his helmet. The bunker is named "Restrepo" after a soldier from his platoon who was recently killed by insurgents.

在这张获奖照片上，这名士兵 瘫倚 着掩体墙壁，一只手捂着眼睛，另一只手紧握着钢盔。掩体名为“雷斯特雷波”，是以他所在排的一名士兵命名的，该士兵于最近被叛乱分子打死。

It was taken on September 16, 2007, in the Korengal Valley, a strategic passage considered one of the most dangerous pieces of terrain for US forces in the world. With Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters fighting for control of the valley, it has seen some of the deadliest battles in the country, including the downing of a US helicopter in 2005 that killed all 16 commandos on board.

这幅照片拍摄于2007年9月16日的科伦加尔山谷。该山谷属于战略通道，被认为是美军在这个世界上碰到的最为危险的地区之一。由于塔利班和“基地”组织成员争夺该山谷的控制权，这里已经发生了数次阿富汗境内最血腥的战斗，包括2005年一架美军直升机在这里坠毁，机上16名突击队员全部丧生。

“This image shows the exhaustion of a man and the exhaustion of a nation,” Gary Knight, the jury chairman, said in a statement. “We’re all connected to this. It is a picture of a man at the end of a line.”

“这张照片体现了一个男人的疲惫和一个国家的疲惫，”评审团主席加里·奈特在声明中说。“我们都与之有关。这是一张无法再忍受下去了的男人的照片。”

Mary Anne Golon, a fellow juror, commented: "I use all my energy to have people notice bad things. There's a human quality to this picture. It says that conflict is the basis of this man's life."

评委玛丽·安·戈伦评论说：“我用尽全力使人们注意到那些不好的事情。这张照片具有一种人文特质。 它表明，冲突成了这个男人生活的主要内容。”

The colour photograph also took the second prize in the General News Stories category.

这幅彩色照片同时还获得了一般新闻类组照二等奖。

Liverpool-born Mr Hetherington spent five months embedded with the 2nd Battalion Airborne of the 503rd US infantry while working with journalist Sebastian Junger on both a film for ABC and a story for Vanity Fair’s January 2008 issue titled “Into the valley of death” .

出生于利物浦的 赫瑟林顿先生花了五个月的时间，深入到美军第503步兵团第2空降营，与记者塞巴斯蒂安 ·容格一起为ABC拍摄电影，同时也为《名利场》杂志2008年1月号“进入死亡谷”采写报道。

In a video recorded for Vanity Fair’s website, Mr Hetherington spoke of his fascination with the discordance between the soldiers’ home lives and the alien environment which they had been thrust into.

在一段为《名利场》网站拍摄的录像上，赫瑟林顿先生谈到了他对士兵们的国内生活与他们被迫驻扎的国外环境之间矛盾的强烈兴趣。

“A lot of them are from Texas or the Midwest, classic middle America that I had never really been close to, and here I was in Afghanistan experiencing combat with these guys. And I suppose that’s what really struck me about them, this dissonance between what they were experiencing and where they had come from.”

“他们很多人来自德克萨斯或中西部地区，都是些我的确从未接近过的典型的美国中产阶级，但是在阿富汗，我和这些人一起经历着战斗。我想，这是他们真正打动我的地方，就是他们的经历和出身之间的这种不和谐。”

He said: “If you look at the statistics there have been 450 separate fire-fights in the five-and-a-half months of Battle Company’s deployment there. The type of fire-fights and the type of combat involved is a range, from indirect fire which can be where mortars are hitting one of the fire bases there to machine gun attacks to snipers.”

他说：“你看一下统计数字，自作战连部署到这里的五个半月时间里，就发生了450次单独交火。所涉交火类型和战斗类型各种各样，从迫击炮打击 某一 重火力点的间接交火到机枪袭击狙击手。”

As a photojournalist he tried to stay as close as possible to the action without endangering his own life and the lives of others, he explained. “There’s an oft-said comment by Robert Kappa that if your pictures aren’t good enough it’s because you’re not close enough, so I try to stay as close as possible to the action while also being aware of cover and aware of safety.”

作为摄影记者，在不危及自己的生命以及他人的生命 的情况下，他努力去尽可能地靠近战斗，他解释说。“人们经常说到罗伯特·卡帕的一句话，如果你的照片不够好，那是因为你靠得不够近，所以我总是尽可能地靠近战斗，同时也注意保护，注意安全。”

Mr Hetherington, who works as both a photographer and filmmaker and had won lesser prizes in the awards in 2000 and 2002, was this morning onboard a flight from the Pacific island of Palau and was expected to arrive in New York later today. It was unclear whether he had been informed of his success in the competition, which carries a cash prize of 10,000 euro.

赫瑟林顿先生既做摄影师，也做电影制作人，他曾于2000年和2002年获得该奖项的几个小奖。他今天上午从太平洋帕劳岛搭乘航班，预计今天晚些时候到达纽约。尚不清楚他是否得知自己在比赛中取得成功，比赛的奖金是10000欧元。

The awards, sponsored by the Dutch Postcode Lottery, Cannon and TNT, attracted a record 5,019 entrants this year from 125 countries.

由荷兰邮政彩票、佳能公司和TNT主办的这一大赛，今年吸引了来自125个国家的5019名参赛者，创下新的纪录。

In addition to the overall winner, the jury awarded first, second and third prizes in 20 categories, and two honourable mentions. Getty Images won the most with five awards, taking first place in both Spot News Singles and Spot News Stories with a blurred image by John Moore, a US photographer, taken at the moment of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on December 27.

除了这名总优胜者外，评委会还在20个类别中评出了一、二、三等奖和两个提名奖。盖蒂图片社独占鳌头，摘取五项奖项，美国摄影师约翰·穆尔12月27日在巴基斯坦拉瓦尔品第贝娜齐尔·贝布托遇刺的瞬间所拍摄的模糊画面，获得了突发新闻类单幅和突发新闻类组照一等奖。

A mesmerising shot of a dead mountain gorilla being carried out of Virunga National Park in Eastern Congo, strapped to a wooden stretcher, won a further award for Getty. The photo, by Brent Stirton, a South African photographer, took first prize in Contemporary Issues Singles.

一幅展现一只绑在木制担架上的死亡山地大猩猩被抬出刚果东部维龙加国家公园的迷人照片为盖蒂图片社赢得又一个大奖。这张照片出自南非摄影师布伦特·斯特顿之手，荣获当代热点类一等奖。  

For Associated Press, Oded Balilty, last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, took third prize for People in the News Stories for a series from Nanjing, China. AP also won an honorable mention for Spot News Singles for an image from the Gaza Strip by Emilio Morenatti, a Spanish photographer.

美联社去年的普利策奖得主以一组拍自中国南京的照片荣获新闻人物类组照三等奖。同时，西班牙摄影师埃米利奥·莫莱纳蒂 拍摄自加沙地带的一幅照片为美联社赢得突发新闻类单幅提名奖。

Balazs Gardi, a Hungarian photographer working for VII Network, took first prize in both General News Singles and General News Stories for his photographs from Afghanistan - one of a man carrying a wounded young boy, and an eerie black-and-white shot of a mountain landscape titled “Operation Rock Avalanche.”

供职于VII网站 的匈牙利摄影师鲍拉日·加尔迪摘取一般新闻类单幅和一般新闻类组照一等奖，其作品均拍摄于阿富汗——一个是一名男子怀抱着受伤的男孩，一个是名为“岩崩军事行动”的神秘山地黑白照片。

Both were taken in the same region of southern Afghanistan as Mr Hetherington’s image.

这两个作品与赫瑟林顿先生的照片一样，拍自阿富汗南部的同一地区。

National Geographic swept the board in the Nature Stories category, with first place going to National Geographic Images for David Liittschwager’s magnified images of ocean life off the coast of Hawaii, and second and third places being awarded to National Geographic Magazine.

《国家地理》囊括自然类组照所有奖项，一等奖由《国家地理》图片的David Liittschwager拍摄的夏威夷海边放大的海洋生物获得，二等奖和三等奖被《国家地理》杂志获得。

The British chalked up another success in the Portraits category, with UK photographer “Platon” taking first place with his head shot of President Vladimir Putin of Russia for Time magazine. Time also won in the People in the News category, with a photo of Kurdish rebel fighters in Northern Iraq taken by Philippe Dudouit of Switzerland.

英国人又一次赢得肖像类大奖，英国摄影师普拉东为《时代》周刊拍摄的俄罗斯总统弗拉季米尔·普京拍摄的头像获得一等奖。《时代》同时还赢得新闻人物类大奖，作品是瑞士摄影师菲利普·迪杜伊在伊拉克北部拍摄的库尔德反叛武装人员。

Bulgarian Ivaylo Velev took the top prize in the Sports Action Singles category for Bul X Vision Photography Agency with his image of competitive skier Philippe Meier fleeing an avalanche in Flaine, France.

保加利亚摄影师伊瓦伊洛·韦列夫为保加利亚X视线图片社摘取体育动作类单幅一等奖，其作品反映的是竞技滑雪 选手菲利普·迈尔在法国弗莱纳逃离雪崩的情景。