“扩张的地域”——连州国际摄影年展主题阐释

                
                
扩张的地域
克里斯多夫·菲利普斯
      在今天这个不断被人类重塑的地球上，无数全新的城市在曾经荒无人烟的土地上崛起。快速的城市化进程让数以亿计的人们纷纷从农村来到城市淘金，并同时带动起史无前例的跨国界人口流动及移民潮。这种日益频繁的国际互动关系激发了众多迥异不同的文化交流碰撞，并让处于高度城市化社会的我们不得不对日渐脆弱的自然生态环境予以全球性的集体关注。
      世界各地摄影师们具有创意的视野恰恰提供给人们对类似经验的全新意识，这些经验今天广泛地把不同国家、地域和本地群体联系起来。这种扩张的地域恰恰就是2015年连州国际摄影节的核心主题，探索世界不同地区之间日趋紧密的相互关系。
       在今年展出的作品中，有三位艺术家将他们的关注点聚焦在生活在海外的华人社区。在作品系列“聚合”中，来自新加坡的华裔摄影师郑玮玲把居住在新加坡和马来西亚两地的华裔中产阶层作为她的拍摄对象，以巧妙的镜头语言描述了他们日常的生活状态和内心情感。庄吴斌，出生在新加坡的第三代华人，同时拥有作家、摄影师和教育工作者等多个身份。他从2006年便开始长期拍摄东南亚地区的华人社区，并在2010年出版了一部名为“十个东南亚唐人街”的摄影集，收录了他在泰国、柬埔寨、马来西亚、新加坡、越南和印尼等地所拍摄的作品。黄东黎是一位出生在中国并曾在杭州的中国美术学院和纽约的帕森设计学院求学的摄影师。她的作品展示了生活在美国的华人是如何通过紧守自己的语言、传统和文化来保留他们在异乡属于自己民族的一席之地。与此同时，黄东黎的照片也让我们意识到在像她那样来自现代中国的年轻人的眼中，或许这样的一些古老传统已经被他们的国家有意识地抛弃，早已经不属于这个高度现代化的时代。
                
                
       华裔摄影师张海的作品则提供给我们一个中西文化相互融合的极佳例子。本为昆明人的张海在2000年于重庆毕业之后便移居美国，之后一直进行对中美两国社会景观的探索与记录，特别是集中在美国南部的非裔黑人社区。本次展出的摄影系列起源于他最近一次横跨美国的公路旅行。在不断地对自身摄影语言进行提炼的过程中，张海仿佛在与美国早期的经典纪实摄影师像罗伯特·弗兰克或盖里·维诺格兰德等展开一场自信的视觉对话。
       另一方面，参展的部分艺术家们则以带有迷幻色彩并有点让人不安的方式为我们描绘这个正不断进行城市化的世界。墨西哥摄影师帕布罗·洛佩兹·鲁兹擅长以高空拍摄的方式记录散落在墨西哥城和周围其他大城市的所谓“人造景观”。他的摄影作品清晰地呈现了大城市的无度扩张，不断地将附近本来荒芜一片的农村土地纳入怀中。相比起洛佩兹·鲁兹从数百米高空中的鸟瞰式观看，住在墨西哥北部蒙特雷市的亚历山卓·卡塔赫纳则选择了从我们熟悉的地面角度去揭示墨西哥大城市周边近年来以爆发式增长的新型住宅区。在他的五部曲作品系列“墨西哥郊外”中，卡塔赫纳以审视的方式重新关注那些有如雨后春笋般散落在全国各地但往往不受政府相关部门监管的新建住宅。通过系统性的分类和归纳，这些住宅区的建筑风格特征以及住在里面的家庭和个人一一被摄影师毫无保留地呈现在镜头面前。
      来自厄瓜多尔的自由摄影师伊万·卡申斯基利用他个人的空余时间以影像的方式传达出城市现代化对其家乡基多城所带来的巨大影响。正如他自己所描述的：“我是在见证祖先们数百年的习俗与充分发展的现代性之间的冲撞，这种混合让人着迷”。卡申斯基经常把他用手机拍摄的既随机又极其丰富的日常照片上传到自己的Instagram页面上，并得到了来自全球观众的关注。法国摄影师安德烈·梅里安的作品系列“海滨之城”则可被视为对当下标准化城市建筑的讽刺式回应。在他的镜头下，我们看到众多法国、西班牙、意大利、土耳其及摩洛哥等国家的海岸线正被平庸的新建筑体所掩盖，逐渐取代曾经在历史文化中占据不可替代地位的传统建筑。
                
                
       盖·蒂利姆是当今南非最杰出的摄影师之一，他重要的作品系列“帕特里斯·卢蒙巴大道”以低沉灰暗的方式表现了后殖民地时代非洲迈向城市化的理想与建筑方向。蒂利姆通过一系列 20 世纪中期非洲具有纪念性意义的建筑遗址的摄影作品，让我们重新关注这批经过精心设计并带有强烈现代主义风格的建筑群，以及当年的政府和人民对非洲大陆即将迈入一个新时代的独立和经济繁荣时期的热切期望。身为当时新独立解放的刚果民主共和国的第一任领袖，富有魅力的总理帕特里斯·卢蒙巴象征了非洲大陆崛起的希望，而多个非洲地区的街道也因此以他的名字命名。然而，这种乐观的情绪并没有维持多久，蒂利姆的作品亦成为了这个悄然没落的现代主义时代的影像凭证。即便如此，蒂利姆依然认为这些富有想象力的建筑已成为非洲人民文化的一个重要组成部分，而他们那曾经的“梦想大道”说不定有一天会在21世纪以另外一种形式实现。
                
                
      日益严峻的国际环境议题极大地改变了我们对世界的认知，使我们不得不需要聚焦于此。“洪水淹没的世界”是居住在伦敦的南非摄影师吉迪恩·孟德尔从 2007 年便开始拍摄的一个摄影项目，揭示了气候变化对全球各地的个人生活的影响。孟德尔通过照片和视频记录了那些由于全球温室效应而长期遭受水灾侵略的地区，从而揭露了全球化所带来的不平等问题。这些地区的居民只能寻求各种办法应对不断上涨的洪水。根据孟德尔本人的说法，这种洪水所带来的巨大灾害代表了人类在面对大自然压倒性破坏的力量时的无助感。他在澳大利亚、巴西、 泰国、 巴基斯坦、 英国、 印度和德国等国家拍摄的肖像尖锐地描述了这些家庭和个人是如何通过各种努力去试图应付洪水的侵害。
                
                
      这种穿插于经济发展与自然生态环境保护之间的争斗角力几乎可以在世界每一个角落看到。厄瓜多尔摄影师玛丽亚·特雷莎·庞塞的 “输油管道”系列聚焦于穿越在委内瑞拉、厄瓜多尔和阿根廷三国之间的众多新建的石油输送管道。在庞塞的全景照片之中，我们可以清晰地看到围绕在管道施工路线旁边那充满田园色彩的自然美好风光。巧妙地是，她选择了把这些石油管道和国家愈发依赖石油作为经济发展基础的政策有可能对将来给附近环境带来的长期后果作为留白，把想象的空间留给了观众自己。
                
                
       从2010 年开始，法国摄影师安东尼·布鲁一直在寻找那些摒弃现代社会生活方式而选择更简单地回归大自然生活的人。布鲁的作品足迹散落在五个欧洲国家的一些偏远地区，描绘了一群拥有独特个性的人和他们亲手建造的充满古朴原始风格的居住环境。布鲁从拍摄对象身上也得得了极大启发，他们抛弃了快节奏现代消费社会那无止境的需求：“再也没有钟表在滴答作响，只有昼、夜、四季和斗转星移”。
       今年连州国际摄影年展最后一组展出的作品虽然和我们设定的主题并没有非常紧密的联系，但是这组充满实验性的作品提醒了我们在摄影的艺术领域里面，不断涌现的创新性对于保持摄影媒介的新鲜感和开拓我们的思维想象空间有着极其重要的作用。艺术家约瑟夫·戴斯勒·科斯塔将现代的广告和设计语言转为己用，通过奇特、令人不安和诡异的方式把我们生活中的日常物品以全新的方式呈现。虽然科斯塔在作品中有意识地模仿出商业摄影中常见那光鲜时髦的图像效果，但他并没有通过数码技术，而是选择了以传统手段在摄影工作室内完成整个拍摄过程。来自美国得克萨斯州奥斯汀的摄影师巴里·斯通则把传统的风景和静物主题作为创作的一个起始点，运用俗称“数码扭曲”的图像处理方式恣意修改数码图像文档后面的代码，打造令人惊叹的视觉效果。
                
                
       如果说科斯塔和斯通的作品表面看起来似乎与我们的生活并不那么接近的话，艺术家德鲁·多诺万的黑白系列“肺部雕刻”对观众来说则有着瞬间让人不安的震慑力。无论这些照片是否通过摆拍而产生，这些怪异、脆弱的人体肢体绝对让人过目难忘。在身居纽约的土耳其艺术家皮纳尔·越拉肯的作品中，人体也担当着重要的中心角色。越拉肯原本是一名时装设计师，她为作品中的模特设计了让人惊叹的服饰与背景。在本届摄影年展展出的系列中，画面里的女模特有着丰满的躯体，犹如在地中海和中东一带地区发现的新石器时期雕塑中的生育之神。在色彩鲜艳的背景之前，模特的躯体被艺术家刻意裁剪以强调主体的力量性，而作品中所迸发的现代女性美感则与传统古典女性形象形成鲜明对比。
                
                
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Expanded Geographies
by Christopher Phillips
 
Welive at a moment when our entire planet is being reshaped by human forces, withgreat new cities arising in previously remote and underpopulated areas. Thisrapid urban development is attracting millions of people from the countrysideto the city in the hope of finding economic prosperity. It is also dramaticallyincreasing the movement and migration of people within and across nationalborders. One result of this global dynamic is to bring people from many differentcultures into direct contact for the first time. Another result is the creationof shared, worldwide awareness of the increased fragility of the naturalenvironment in the face of industrial development and hyper-urbanization.
 
Thecreative vision of photographers around the world is helping to focus a newawareness of the parallel experiences that today link widely separatedcountries, regions, and local communities. This sense of expanded geographiesis the central theme of the Lianzhou Foto Festival 2015, as it explores theemerging connections between different parts of the globe.
 
Threeof the participants in Lianzhou Foto 2015 uses their cameras to portrayoverseas Chinese communities around the world. In her series “Convergence,” WeiLeng Tay, an ethnic Chinese Singaporean, photographs mostly middle-classChinese families in Singapore and Malaysia. Often set in quiet domestic spaces,her portraits subtly suggest the strains of the social world and the innerlives of her subjects. Zhuang Wubin, a third-generation Chinese born inSingapore, is a writer, photographer, and educator. Since 2006 he has beencarrying out long-term projects in the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia.His 2010 book Ten Chinatowns of Southeast Asia brings together his photographsof Chinese communities in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, andIndonesia. Huang Dongli, who was born in China and studied at the China Academyof Art in Hongzhou and at Parsons School of Design in New York, is a closeobserver of Chinatowns in the U.S. Her photographs demonstrate how immigrantChinese communities have survived, in part, by holding tight to their ownlanguage, traditions, and culture. She also shows, however, how quaint andoutdated some of these traditions can appear to a young visitor from China likeherself, someone who has grown up in a modernizing country that has consciouslyabandoned many of its oldest traditions.
 
ZhangHai provides a fascinating example of a Chinese photographer who has immersedhimself in a culture very different from the one in which he was raised. Bornin Kunming and educated in Chongqing, he has lived since 2000 in the U.S. Hisindependent photography projects have led him to explore the social landscapein both China and the U.S., especially in the African-American communities ofthe American South. The photographs shown at Lianzhou Foto 2015 are the resultof a recent “road trip” across the American continent. As he refines his ownphotographic language, Zhang Hai engages in a confident visual dialogue withthe work of earlier photographers of America, such as Robert Frank and GarryWinogrand.
 
Anothergroup of photographers in Lianzhou Foto 2015 offers hypnotic and sometimeunsettling images of the ongoing urbanization of the world. Pablo Lopez Luzspecializes in aerial views of what he calls the “constructed landscape”surrounding his home town, Mexico City, and other large metropolitan areas inMexico. His photographs show the relentless urban sprawl that is pushing itsway into the countryside and completely covering once-bare land formations.While in this series Lopez Luz photographs mainly from a distance, AlejandroCartegna, who lives in the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico, works atground level to reveal the explosive growth of new residential housingdevelopments on the periphery of Mexico’s large cities. In his five-part series“Suburbia Mexicana,” Cartegna examines the new residential zones that arespringing up thoughout the country, often unregulated by government authorities.He presents a systematic look at the characteristic architectural styles of thenew suburban zones, and offers sympathetic portraits of the varied families andindividuals who live there.
 
IvanKashinsky, an active freelance photographer in Ecuador, uses his free momentsto make pictures that tell the story of the impact of modernization on his hometown, Quito. As he describes it, “I’m witnessing the collision of hundreds ofyears of ancestral customs with full-blown modernity, and the mix is fascinating.”Kashinsky regularly posts his casual but richly images of daily life inQuito—all made with his smartphone camera—on Instagram, where they haveattracted much attention. A more ironic response to the standardized urbanarchitecture found around the world today can be seen in the “Waterfront”series by the French photographer André Mérian. Taking as his subject the banalnew buildings that increasingly line the historic waterfronts of the portcities of the Mediterranean, he documents the rapid disappearance of anirreplaceable part of the architectural heritage of France, Spain, Italy,Turkey, and Morocco.
 
Inthe remarkable series “Avenue Patrice Lumumba,” Guy Tillim, one of SouthAfrica’s most distinguished photographers, presents a somber meditation onarchitecture and urban imagination in postcolonial Africa. Tillim directs ourattention to the remains of the architectural monuments of mid-20th-centuryAfrica. This was a period when elaborate modernist-style buildings wereconstructed in expectation that the continent would soon enter a new age ofindependence and economic prosperity. It was the era when Patrice Lumumba, thecharismatic prime minister of the newly liberated Democratic Republic of theCongo, came briefly to symbolize the continent’s rising hopes, and streets werenamed after him throughout Africa. The high hopes of that moment did not lastlong, and Tillim’s photographs amount to a mournful collection of images ofcrumbling modernist ruins. Tillim feels that such architectural relics havenevertheless won a place in the African cultural imagination, as an “avenue ofdreams” that may be realized in a different form in the 21st century.
 
Oneforce that is dramatically reshaping our sense of the world’s geography is thegrowing importance of environmental issues that cut across national borders.Evidence of this development is provided in the work of another group ofphotographers in Lianzhou Foto 2015. “Drowning World,” a project begun in 2007by the London-based South African photographer Gideon Mendel, reveals theimpact of climate change on individual lives around the globe. Mendelphotographs and makes videos in areas that now experience severe flooding on aregular basis since the onset of global warming. The inhabitants of these areascontend with rising floodwaters on a recurring basis, and the different ways inwhich they are able to cope with them reveals global inequities. Mendel saysthat such flooding “represents an overwhelming, destructive force that rendershumanity helpless in its wake.” His incisive portraits show families andindividuals desperately attempting to cope with floodwaters in such countriesas Australia, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, Great Britain, India, and Germany.
 
Thetension between economic development and the safeguarding of the naturalenvironment can be discovered in almost every region of the world today. MariaTeresa Ponce’s “Pipeline” series concentrates on the recently built oilpipeline that runs across her home country, Ecuador. Ponce’s panoramicphotographs offer idyllic images of the natural splendor that surrounds theroute cleared for the construction of the pipeline. She leaves it to the viewerto imagine the long-term environmental consequences of her country’s growingdependence on oil as a source of energy to power its economic development.
 
Since2010, French photographer Antoine Bruy has sought out people who have chosen toabandon modern society and adopt a much simpler, nature-oriented way of living.Bruy’s photographs, made in remote settlements in five European countries,depict a group of unique personalities and the pre-modern dwellings they haveconstructed. Bruy finds inspiration in his subjects, who have left behind theceaseless demands of a fast-paced consumer society: “No more clock ticking butthe ballet of days and nights, seasons, and lunar cycles.”
 
Afinal group of artists in Lianzhou Photo 2015, whose works lie slightly outsidethe main theme, reminds us that continued experimentation is always necessaryto keep the practice of photographic image-making fresh and enlivened new modesof seeing and thinking. Joseph Desler Costa adapts for his own purposes thelanguage of contemporary advertising and design, and photographs mass-produedobjects that he renders strange, troubling, and enigmatic. Although heconsciously mimics the sleek look of Photoshopped commercial imagery, hecreates all of his remarkable visual effects in the studio without the aid ofdigital manipulation. Barry Stone, a photographer living in Austin, Texas, usestraditional landscapes and still life themes only as a starting point. His realinterest lies in manipulating the digital code that underlies his color images– a process sometimes called “data-bending” -- to create eerily beautifulvisual effects.
 
Whilethe works of Costa and Stone seem at first glance to be blithely impersonal,the black-and-white photographs in Dru Donovan’s series “Carving the Lung” showus human figures that have an immediate and disturbing presence. It hardlymatters whether the scenes are staged or not, because the awkward and strangelyvulnerable human bodies in them prove so unforgettable. The human body alsoplays a central role in the works of New York-based Turkish artist PinarYolacan. Trained as a fashion designer, she creates astonishing costumes andstudio sets for her models. In the series shown at Lianzhou Foto 2015, sheemploys female models whose bodies recall the Pre-Neolithic sculptures offertility goddesses found in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Posing hermodels in front of brightly colored backdrops, and cropping the images toemphasize the powerful shape of the subject’s torso, Yolacan contrasts ancientconcepts of the ideal female form with those of today.
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                                                第十一届连州国际摄影年展
                                                  LIANZHOU FOTO 2015
                                                  年展主题：扩张的地域
                                   Curatorial Theme：Expanded Geographies
                                          时间：2015年11月21日至12月10日
                                                      地点：广东·连州
                                           Time: Nov.21st～Dec.10th，2015
                                             Venue: Lianzhou，Guangdong
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