哈金 自由生活 P 399


漸漸地，他領悟到自己和老人之間的根本區別。劉先生是個流亡人士，他的生活是由過去決定的，只有跟將他放逐的權力中樞保持著關聯，他才可能存在。這就是劉先生的悲劇 ﹣他不可能把自己與那個能夠時刻控制他，折磨他的國家機器分開。沒有故國已經構成的框架，他的生活就會失去意義和支撐。這一定是那多懷舊的流亡人士會頌揚苦難和愛國主義的原因所在。他們人在這裡,可是因為受了輝煌過去的束縛，他們不能適應在新大陸的生活。相反，武男是個移民，沒有顯赫的，也是沉重的過去。對當局來說，他什麼也不是，根本不存在，他連個可以去懇求的官員也沒有。他不過是個移民，甚至是個難民，誰會聽他說什麼？


P436

武男感到，元寶這樣縱情的虛誇，己經超出了僅僅是虛榮心的程度。他在利用兩種語言之間的差別進行欺騙 ﹣沒幾個中國人熟悉 “藍星“ 月刊和蒂姆的寫作，那篇譯文可能會誤導他們，使他們以為那是一份和中國各種大雜誌一樣有名的刊物，而蒂姆．都靈頓則一定是位公認的藝術評家了。“藝術世界“ 是海外發行的一份高品質中文雜誌，所以，把原來那篇文章搬到這樣一個大雜誌上，就等於把元寶抬到了一一個不同的位置，好像他在美國已經是個名人了。簡而言之，通過這種誤導的過程，在中文讀者心目中就把元寶的形象拔高到他原本沒到的高度了．

這真是個聰明的騙術。武男心想，元寶要是把更多時間花在藝術上，他的畫會好得多。


P275

小男人

幾個月前，一位女士在一篇題為“譴責小男人“ 的尖刻文章裡批評了一些中國男人，說他們沉湎於過去，不作任何融入美國社會的努力。按她的話說....這些人不能適應這裡的生活光會在他們的妻子和女朋友身上撒氣，把自己的失敗歸咎於美國。在愛國主義和維護中國文化的託詞下，他們拒絕向其他文化學習任何東西。他們在其他種族人群中沒有朋友，也拒不學英語。他們就像陷在缸裡的螃蟹，互相踩踏，誰也爬不出去。......可他們還堅信自己的天才，來到美國是虎落平陽，英雄無用武之地，好像全世界沒人比他們更倒楣了。在美國大多數中國女人，天性裡並不想當女強人，可他們的小男人逼得她們承擔更多的責任，同時扮演妻子和丈夫兩個角色。

如今，女人用小男人的稱呼去攻擊男人是很普遍的。那意味著：那男人是個該被所有女人鄙視的，亳無希望的窩囊廢。

Gregory Crewdson, interview with Melissa Harris ( www.aperture.org/crewdson )

Credwson:

So whoever the photographer is, that's a constant, because it's who they are. It's their history. It's their trauma, it's their desire, it's their fascination, it's their terror - all that. So you have that story, that compulsion, and then you have the pictorial form., which is the attempt to take that invisible story and represent it in pictorial form. So it's that coming - together of form and content, essentially. Then that changes, because you continue to try to reinvent the form to accommodate the story as much as possible. Of course, in the end it's impossible to fully achieve the form , because the story is murky and undefined. So you try it over and over again, and you are hoping by the next picture you'll get it - and that keeps you going. It's like this unsolvable equation.

PIEERE ET GILLES : DOUBLE JE Aperture May, 2008

P20

Complexity was clearly on the agenda in this very well-conceived show, which emphasized both the diversity and the relevance of a controversial body of work always teetering on the edge of High Kitsch. Political commentaries ( colorful but not very convincing images about poverty, environmental crisis, the war in Iraq and abused women, for example ) were juxtaposed with the better-known pissing gardeners, dark-skinned boys, and bilical characters. The viewer was asked to see profundity in the sensuality and the glamour, to envisage ( as Paul Ardenne writes in the accompanying book) "another possible vision of humanity ...where love above all will reign master of the world." In other words, we were asked to view this exhibition as a new, utopian vision of the Family of Man - The Family of Erotic Man, one might say - where beauty will conquer all , level all differences , and heal all wounds. The audacity of such an ahistorical ( and over - blown ) interpretation renders one speechless, but it did lend a certain weight and poignancy to an oeuvre often seen as unremittingly lightweight and one-dimensional.

reGeneration/ Preface

What are young photographers up to these days? Whose influence are they heeding, consciously or unconsciously ? Are they conformist or contentious ? Idealist or realist ? Escapist or engaged ? Are we on the cusp of something new ( a movement, a revolt, a new dawn), or still at the tail-end of a chapter, wallowing in the so-called decadent phase? Are emerging photographers leaning toward classical approaches to photography or inclined towards those of contemporary art ? Are they remaining loyal to film and chemistry or abandoning camp in droves for pixels and Photoshop ? Or are they at ease with a mix of the two technologies, according to their needs ?

Quote / Shomei Tomatsu 55

Tomatsu seems to have liked to work at a distance from the subject, so that it becomes necessary to peer into the picture if it is to be understood. One might in part explain this as diffidence on Tomatsu's part- not wishing to poke his nose into the minutiae of others' lives. Nonetheless , at long range, those lives become all the more fascinating , since this guarantees the authenticity of the pictures. Unaware of the photographer's presence, the subjects would have unselfconsciously given a reliable account of themselves. Manyof these early phtographers therefore invite detailed scrutiny, rewarded by the eventual recognition of all sorts of seemingly extraneous evidence. Paradoxically, this deliberately restrained documentary gives us the fullest possible account of a subject's life. All those apparently superfluous bits and pieces, which we - along with conventional documentarists - usually choose to overlook, in fact constitute the basis of our lives.

Another important aspect of the early pictures is their darkness and the suppression of detail. Darkness is a feature in much of the poetic documentary of the post-war years. It had romantic value as a pointer to melancholy. Light, for which one might read enlightenment, ahd to struggle to overcome the spiritual darkness of the era. But there is little of this metaphysical darkness in Tomatsu's pictures of the mid-1950s. Nonetheless, he liked to deploy shadows. Sometimes almost to the detriment of the picture, obscuring significant physical details. Many of the photographs appear at first to be nothing more than arrangements in chiaroscuro. What lies behind the shadows can only be surmised from the firm evidence available. The act of looking at the picture therefore often turns into a prolonged enquiry, as one works from the known to the unknown. Increasingly, this became Tomatsu's method of ensuring that audiences examined his pictures, a way of inviting them into the scene. If the image involved the human form, it had to be understood by reference to one's won limbs and features. This meant that the photograph was to some degree internalized, subject to what one might call corporeal reflection. Many of Tomatsu's pictures ask to be re-enacted in imagination, to a point where the subject is brought as close as photography will allow.

quote /Photography is a foreign language/ Peter Galassy


....whatever else might be said about Winogrand's work, it is unsurpassed for its voracious curiosity about life at large. Winogrand turned that voracity into a highly self-conscious artistic style but, like Evans before him, he regarded photography primarily as a tool for engaging the inexhaustible reality of experience.

Evans never tired of pointing out that in respect to photography the term "documentary" properly refers not to a claim on moral truth but to an artistic style, based upon the illussion that the photograph is a transparent window on reality: the viewer stands where the photographer once stood. Nevertheless, many prefer to take the illusion for reality, looking right through the picture and seeing only its subject matter: standing there, anyone would have made the same photograph. This die-hard habit, born of endless everyday encounters with photography, renders invisible the artifice of the documentary style. As diCorcia puts it, "photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks "


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What is distinctive, and essential to grasping the originality of diCorcia's work, is the degree to which he showed sympathetic curiosity for two divergent understandings of photography. The one taking the impersonal power of popular and commercial culture as a given, approached photography as a realm of fiction and duplicity. The other, devoted to the authenticity of individual perceptions, approached photography as a way of interpreting experience. In the 1980s as that divergence evolved into open opposition, diCorcia was making art the gap between the two.

Photography is a foreign language / p10

Quote : Setting Sun

There was one photograph.

Most of it was exposed to sunlight and the tone was like white powder sprinkled onto the print. The image itself was suffused with glaring light and taken in some kind of flat expanse. The bleak scene looked like a yard. The border between the ground and the sky was unclear, as though the light had melted the two worlds. In the left part of the image, slightly toward the lower half, there was a gray, mudlike formation, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a person. The form gave the overall impression of being a man dressed in a ragged, padded kimono. His unkempt hair, looking like withered grass, pointed in our direction as he looked down. At the center of the right third of the image there was a shadow cast by an assembly of persons and when I squinted, it turned out to be three children clustered together, standing still. They all appeared to be wearing rags that were cinched at the waist with cords, and they were barefoot. Their expressions were too faint to see in the print, but they all seemed to have their gaze trained in our direction. Behind the children was something that couldn't be anything other than the wall of a house. And beyond that there was something like the overlapping outlines of two sheds that were blurred together. And even farther in the distance were the shadows of trees, growing faint and hazy. Because of them the horizon was somewhat distinguishable.

Time's Fossil/ P72/ Daido Moriyama

Photography in principal is the fossilization of some actual thing, but for a landscape to be so spectacularly turned into a fossil remarkable.

Time's Fossil/ P73/ Daido Moriyama