展览前言  
影像时刻：早期中国摄影视觉的发生

Preface
Photographic Moments: The Emergence of Photographic Visuality in China

自从摄影传入中国，这一新的视觉与传播媒介就构成了近代中国视觉文化中的重要内容。摄影不仅仅是一张张完成了的照片，而是这张照片得以生成的完整过程。“时刻”与“发生”这两个用语都在强调作为事件、动作与时间的摄影。

Since its introduction to China, photography as a new visual and communicative medium has gained prominence in modern Chinese visual culture. Photography shall not be merely regarded as completed images, but the whole process through which the picture takes its form. The terms “moment” and “emergence” both emphasise photography as an event, action and time. 

“影像时刻”正是这一事件过程中的爆裂瞬间：一台摄影机与一个拍摄对象相遇，目光、表情、人与机器碰撞、主体截取与凝固世界，而背后又是这一切得以可能的全部历史条件，连带着近代中国的社会文化语境、美学传统、视觉惯例与其时各种老旧与新生的视觉媒介网络。在这个过程中，一种可称为是摄影视觉的感知机制慢慢培育出来，这是属于摄影这一机械复制、自动再现媒介的独特视觉形态，与既往人类全部图像媒介的视觉经验不同，一种装置式的、索引性的、程序化的视觉感知成为中国视觉现代性转型的重要动力。

The ‘photographic moments’ are precisely the explosive instants in the process of this event: a camera encounters the photographed; gazes, expressions, and humans collide with the machine; the subject captures and freezes the world. Behind all these are the historical conditions that made them possible, together with the social and cultural context, aesthetic tradition, visual convention in modern China, as well as various old-fashioned and newly born visual media networks at that time. In this process, a perceptual mechanism that could be named ‘photographic visuality’ gradually developed. It is a unique visuality that exclusively belongs to photography as the medium of mechanical reproduction and automatical representation, distinguishing itself from all previous visual experiences evoked by media of image in history. As a result, an installation-like, indexical, and programmed visual perception becomes a crucial driving force for the transformation of Chinese visual modernity.

对这种摄影视觉的揭示，恰恰无法以单纯的摄影媒介来完成，本次展览在一种综合性的媒介环境中展示摄影（而非照片），在新闻画报、漫画图像、文学描述、绘画、幻灯、电影等整体影像文化所提供的再现图景、叙事语境、情感与欲望的网络中，显现出摄影在其时如何被观念性地对待，如何发挥作用，如何作为全球性符号流通体系中的一员，形塑近代国人对世界和自身的理解。

The revelation of this photographic visuality cannot, however, solely depend on photography itself. In this light, the exhibition presents photography (including but not limited to photographs) in a comprehensive media environment. In the nexus of representational images, narrative contexts, emotion and desire provided by the whole image culture incorporating news pictorial, comics, literature, paintings, slide shows, films and other media, the exhibition aims to elaborate on how photography was conceptually perceived, functioned, and played a part in the global circulation system of signs, shaping Chinese people’s modern understanding of the world and themselves.

第一单元 世界图像的时代

摄影的发明将人类带入“世界图像的时代”，这不仅是世界的图像化，更是图像化的世界的全球流通，摄影图像完美遵循着资本主义商品批量复制的逻辑。不可见、不可移动的对象世界变成一张张薄薄的平面，人们可以轻易获取。近代中国人在照片中观看和理解世界。立体视镜中精巧的大千世界，在贴近镜头的眼中，形成一种私密的身体化的观看体验。

Unit One
The Age of World Images

The invention of photography has brought humans into the ‘age of world images’, which not only refers to the pictorialisation of the world but also the global circulation of the pictorialised world. The photographic image perfectly conforms to the logic of mass reproduction of capitalist commodities. The invisible and immovable world of objects is transformed into thinnish plates that people can easily access. Modern Chinese people hence see and understand the world in photographs. The exquisite yet boundless world in the stereoscope creates an intimate and physical viewing experience in their eyes close to the lens.

第二单元 目光与表情：摄影的灵韵

本雅明面对卡夫卡童年照中那双无辜的大眼睛，将照片中人的面容称为机械复制时代最后的灵韵（aura）。罗兰·巴特也将照片中人或物发出的“小小幻影”称为“摄影的幽灵” 。当中国人最初面对一架摄影机的时候，我们发现了早期摄影的目光和表情，这种目光和表情从来没有被认真对待过。在早期肖像照片中，摄影的陌生性仍在，那些低垂躲避的眼睛、迷惑不解的眼神、直面而探究的目光，直接穿透画面，暴露摄影机器——这种新的人-物关系的存在，更彰显出摄影的索引真实性（indexical realness）。这是为什么那些百余年前的小小幻影至今仍能吸引我们禁不住去探求他/她们是谁、为何在此、那活泼的生命去向了哪里的原因。

Unit Two
Gazes and Expressions: The Aura of Photography

Looking at the big innocent eyes of Franz Kafka in his childhood portrait, Walter Benjamin describes the face in the photograph as the last aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. Roland Barthes also terms the ‘eidolon’ radiated by people or objects in a photograph as a “Spectrum”. When the Chinese were first confronted with cameras, we find the gazes and expressions captured in early photography that never have been taken seriously. In early portrait photography, the defamiliarisation with photography can still be found in those downcast and evading eyes, confused and puzzled looks, and direct and inquisitive gazes, which penetrate the frame and expose the hidden camera—the presence of this new human-object relationship has further highlighted the indexical realness of photography. That is why those tiny “eidolons” of more than a century ago still attract us to quest who they are, why they are here, and where they have gone.

第三单元 作为文人表达的摄影

摄影很快成为文人雅士与知识阶层进行书写与表达的有力手段。在文人雅集活动中，合影留念取代了传统的书画创作，人们正是用传统书画意境理解雅集照片。而照片题诗赠予友人，作为题画诗的新形态，积极参与了新兴知识阶层自我形象的塑造，无论是多情浪子苏曼殊，还是“我以我血荐轩辕”的启蒙者鲁迅，照片都构成了有着传统文人与现代知识分子之混杂身份的人们在身体、情感与民族家国之间进行譬喻嫁接的通路。

Unit Three
Photography as an Expression of the Literati

Photography immediately became a powerful means for the literati and intellectuals to create and self-express. In their elegant gatherings, taking a group photograph as commemoration has replaced traditional painting and calligraphy practices, although these photographs of elegant gatherings were still perceived within the aesthetics of traditional painting and calligraphy. In the meantime, inscribing poems on photographs and presenting them to friends confirmed the new form of poems for pictures, allowing photographs to actively participate in constructing self-images of the emerging intellectual class. From Su Manshu, the amorous flaneur to Lu Xun, the enlightener who wrote, “I shall offer my blood up for Xuan Yuan, our progenitor”, photographs constituted a metaphorical and interrelated pathway between traditional literati and modern intellectuals in their bodies, emotions and national homeland.

第四单元 摄影与国民性话语
    
从晚清到“五四”运动，近代启蒙知识分子的核心议题之一是国民性问题。鲁迅在一张幻灯片中看到看客“麻木”的表情，进而批判国民劣根性，尝试以笔唤醒沉睡的国民。摄影并非透明，拍摄对象与视角的选择和摆置，都体现拍摄者隐匿的观念。在近代西方殖民主义猎奇般的凝视下，西方摄影师镜头中的中国人凸显着“愚昧”“落后”等负面状态。而这一殖民视角又被摄影的科学属性所加强，人们相信摄影不仅呈现外观真实，更可以揭示事物内在的本质真实，近代中国人之性质于是因此成为可见、可量化的因而也就是真实的无可辩驳的属性——这当然是需要批判的，它实质上反映着，以摄影图像为代表的，近代中国话语权的衰弱。

Unit Four
Photography and the Discourse of National Character

From the late Qing Dynasty to the May Fourth Movement, the issue of Chinese national character has always remained a central theme for enlightening intellectuals. Lu Xun once discovered the “numb” expressions of the spectators in a beheading image, which led him to criticise the cultural weakness and flaws inherent in the nation and attempt to use writing to wake up his fellow countrymen. Photography is far from transparent or neutral. The selection and manipulation of objects and perspectives in the shooting process always manifest the implicit conceptions of the photographer. Under the gaze of modern western colonialism seeking monstrousness of the Others, Chinese people in the lens of western photographers were portrayed as ‘benighted’ and ‘uncultured’. Worse still, such a colonialist bias was so enhanced by photography’s scientific attribute that people believed that the technology could not only represent the external realness but also reveal the internal essence of the photographed. In this way, the weakness and flaws in modern Chinese people’s national characters became visible, quantifiable, and thus factual and indisputable—this history and such ideas, for sure, deserve critical interrogations. They are substantial embodiments of modern China’s lack of right to speak when photographic images were employed as a representative language. 

第五单元 摄影与其他视觉媒介

摄影是独立的区别于既有全部视觉媒介的艺术这一观念，并不适用于早期摄影的历史。相反，摄影与包括印刷、绘画、幻灯、电影等在内的各种媒介相互影响、交融、结合，共同作用于接受者，构成近代中国丰富复杂的视觉文化。

Unit Five
Photography and Miscellaneous Visual Media

The concept that photography is an independent art form distinctive from all established visual media does not apply to its early history. On the contrary, photography interacted, intermingled, and combined with various media, including printing, painting, slides, and film. Together, they created a synthesised experience for the audience, constituting a rich and comprehensive visual culture in modern China.

策展人

唐宏峰| Tang Hongfeng

策展助理

杨云鬯| Yang Yunchang

湖南益阳人，1990年生于广东，北京大学艺术学院博雅博士后，兼任伦敦大学学院（UCL）人类学系荣誉研究员、期刊Photography and Culture编辑。他在2020年获得伦敦大学学院人类学与视觉文化的博士学位，曾求学于伦敦大学亚非学院、加州大学伯克利分校和中山大学，研究领域包括艺术人类学、视觉人类学、中国现当代视觉文化，目前致力于探索中国摄影史上的“业余主义”及中国当代艺术的“民族志转向”。

郑紫涵 | Zheng Zihan

湖南长沙人，现为谢子龙影像艺术馆学术助理，专注馆藏影像研究及相关图像理论。先后于湖南师范大学中文系和伦敦大学亚非学院东亚系取得文学学士及硕士学位，探索文学与图像话语之间的共鸣与转化。

李辉 | Li Hui

河北石家庄人，先后于北京电影学院、北京大学艺术学院取得艺术学学士和艺术硕士学位，现于伦敦大学国王学院攻读博士学位，研究领域包括电影理论、电影史和视觉文化研究。他也在探索具有学术研究性质的非虚构影像实践，制有视频论文《现代瘟疫小史》。

罗玥沁 | Luo Yueqin

湖南湘西人，现为北京大学艺术学院博士研究生。聚焦于摄影理论、摄影史、媒介批评与视觉文化研究，关注当代摄影中的机会与自动、游牧与流动，以及历史性图像的叙述问题。