摄影和文化翻译随想

Notes on Photography and Cultural Translation

作者 露西·苏特
by Lucy Soutter

本文探讨了摄影影像和观念的文化翻译问题，尤其是东西方之间的文化翻译问题。观众和机构受制于摄影应展示民族特性的顽固观念，这种对文化差异的强调抑制了更多层次诠释的可能。文化翻译工作涉及主体而非客体的运动，对话和个人经历对理解至关重要。文章以作者在中国的工作经历为基础，试图从霍米·K·巴巴、雅克·朗西埃和二十世纪六十年代的批判教育学中寻找能为摄影教育的视角转变提供建设性意见的概念。
The essay explores issues in the cultural translation of photographic images and ideas, particularly between East and West. Audiences and institutions continue to fall prey to the persistent notion that photography should demonstrate aspects of national identity. This foregrounding of cultural difference inhibits more layered interpretations. The work of cultural translation involves the movement of subjects rather than objects, with dialogue and personal experience essential to understanding. Drawing on the author’s experience working in China, the essay looks to Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Rancière and 1960s critical pedagogy for constructive terms to shift the perspective of photographic education.

无法翻译的边界A Margin of Untranslatability

2016年，我关于当代摄影的专著《为什么是艺术摄影？》被翻译成了中文。一个英国朋友问我：“你的译者在书名中用了哪些汉字来表示‘摄影’这个词？你知不知道这个词有几种可能的翻译，而且含义也不同。”当我面对从一种语言到另一种语言的文本翻译时，我突然感到恐慌。即使翻译得非常流利和熟练，翻译过程总会以许多方式改变文本的意义，更何况并非所有的词语或概念都能直接被翻译。原文的词语很少与另一种语言中的词语完全等同，而被翻译语言所处的目标文化对其也会有其自己的解释方式。毫无疑问，无论翻译者技巧是否娴熟，我的书的译本与我的书的原书都是完全不同的文本。然而，谁能说这本新书与原书相比究竟更差还是更好呢？ 没有多年在中国学习和生活的经验，我无法知道译者在选择字眼的过程中会产生什么新的命题，可能打开什么新的对话空间。当然，对于摄影的跨文化讨论，翻译这本书总要比不翻译好得多。
In 2016, my monograph about contemporary photography, Why Art Photography? was translated into Chinese. A British friend asked me, “Which Chinese characters did your translator use for the word ‘photography’ in the title of your book? You do realise that there are several possibilities, don’t you, with quite different connotations?” I felt a sudden panic, as I was brought face- to-face with fundamental facts about the translation of text from one language to another. Even when made with the greatest possible fluency and skill, a translation will always change the meaning of a text in many ways, and not all words or concepts will be directly translatable. Words rarely have an exact equivalence to those in another language, and the target culture into which the text is translated will also have its own modes of interpretation. Despite the skill of the translator, the translation of my book is undoubtedly a different text to the one I wrote. Yet who is to say that this new book is any worse or perhaps better than the original? Without years of study and living in China, I cannot know what new propositions are produced by the translator’s choice of characters, what new dialogues it may open. Certainly, for the purposes of intercultural discussion of photography, it is much better to have translated the book than not.

这个故事凸显了国际摄影讨论过程中的一些核心问题。当我们基于不同的词语、概念和传统使用语言和文字表达关于摄影影像与摄影观念时，我们如何辨析我们对它们理解的异同？当然，一个人可以花一生的时间沉浸在另一个文化当中，在感受其复杂性的基础上逐渐理解。有许多学者正是如此践行，并凭借他们的工作逐渐改变了文化景观。能流利使用语言的国际化摄影师和文字工作者对此至关重要。翻译者作为有能力让意义打破边界的人，在这种环境中扮演着至关重要的角色。但对于我们这些日常在西方摄影学术环境中从事教学的人来说，问题依旧存在：我们如何更好地理解这种文化翻译的工作？我们如何帮助它前进？
This story raises some key issues at the heart of international discussions of photography. How can we discuss the similarities and differences in our understanding of photographic images and ideas when we are using different words, concepts and traditions to speak and write about them? Of course, one can spend a lifetime becoming immersed in the complexities of another’s culture, and gradually develop understanding. Many scholars devote their careers to these issues, and their work gradually shifts the cultural landscape. International photographers and writers with multiple fluencies are essential to this endeavour. The figure of the translator is key as an agent who can work meaningfully across boundaries. But for those of us whose day-to-day teaching takes place in Western photography programmes, the questions remain: how can we better understand this work of cultural translation? How can we help it along?

这些问题不仅仅是学术性的。在欧洲和美国，越来越多的摄影学生来自海外，尤其是环太平洋地区。思考在摄影课程中应该讲些什么内容以及如何讲授这些内容成为了一项持续性的任务。问题不再是我们今天需要了解什么才能成为一名摄影师，而是我们需要了解什么才能成为一个可以在不同环境与文化中来去自如的全球化摄影师。
These questions are not merely academic. A growing proportion of photography students in Europe and the United States are from overseas, increasingly from the Pacific Rim. It is an ongoing task to consider what to teach on photography courses and how to teach it. For the question is not merely what do you need to know to be a photographer today, but what do you need to know to be a global photographer, moving between contexts and cultures?

本文简单探讨了摄影影像与摄影观念在文化翻译中，尤其是在东西方文化之间的一些问题。首先，我声明我的观点是西方的，因为在美国和英国成长并接受教育。这两个英语文化之间微小但不可忽视的差距触发了我对这个主题的兴趣。我个人对于非西方摄影文化的翻译感受主要来自我过去几年在中国的工作经验。我希望我基于这些经验做出的观察和提议，能够开启一些更为广泛的关注点。虽然我并不是一个翻译，但我作为一名摄影历史学家、理论家和评论家的角色同样涉及到在不同的话语体系中建立桥梁联系，帮助一种文化背景的文化工作者理解来自另一种文化背景的作品。在这篇文章中，我借鉴了涉及文化交流问题的学术学科，特别是哲学、后殖民主义研究和翻译研究，因为它们能有效解释本文所探讨的问题。最后，希望本文所探讨的问题能对未来的国际摄影教育、交流与文化发展做出自己的贡献。
This essay is a brief introduction to some of the issues in the cultural translation of photographic images and ideas, particularly between East and West.1 From the start, I acknowledge that my perspective is Western, as I have been educated and raised in the United States and Britain. The small but not inconsequential gap between these two Anglophone cultures has informed my interest in the topic. My own principal experience of translation with a non-western photographic culture has been in relation to working experiences I have had in China over the past couple of years. I hope that my observations and proposals, rooted in this experience, will open up some points of broader concern. I am not a translator myself, though my role as a photography historian, theorist and critic involves bridging different discourses, and interpreting the work of one set of cultural workers so that it can be understood by another. In this essay, I draw on academic disciplines that address issues of cultural exchange, in particular philosophy, post- colonial studies and translation studies in order to consider their usefulness to the current situation. Above all, I hope to contribute to a dialogue that will extend into future international photographic education, networks and cultures.

全球化的当代The Global Contemporary

首先，我将对这篇文章所探讨的问题做一个简单的概括。尽管接下来的故事大家都非常熟悉，但值得再说一次。21世纪，随着艺术全球化与劳动力全球化的同步展开，摄影也开启了迅速而夸张的国际化进程。我们这些在摄影界工作的人现在对海外留学生、环球摄影师、国际策展人、国际收藏家已经非常熟悉，而行程表里也写满了世界各地的摄影作品展、博览会、摄影节以及作品拍卖会。越来越多的摄影书籍被翻译成其他语言，越来越多的关于非西方文化的摄影出版物发行到全世界，为世界不同地区的相互了解做出了贡献。这里我需要重点提到近年来出版的两本关于中国和东南亚摄影的优秀英文书籍：一本是在中国出生、美国工作的学者巫鸿撰写的《Zooming in: Histories of Photography in China(聚焦：摄影在中国)》，另一本是新加坡摄影师、作家庄吴斌撰写的《Southeast Asia: A Survey(东南亚摄影概论)》。
First, I will provide a very abbreviated summary of the situation to which this essay responds. The story is familiar, but bears repeating. The 21st century has seen a rapid, dramatic internationalization of photography, in tandem with the globalisation of art—and of labour—more broadly. Those of us who work in the photography world are now very familiar with overseas students, globetrotting photographers, international curators, cosmopolitan collectors and a packed calendar of global photography exhibitions, fairs, festivals and auctions. As a positive contribution to mutual understanding, there are more and more photography books being translated from one language to another, and more than ever being published internationally about the photography of non-western cultures. I might mention two excellent books on the photography of China and Southeast Asia published in English in recent years: Zoomingin: Histories of Photography in China by Wu Hung, a Chinese-born scholar working in the United States, and Photography in Southeast Asia: A Surveyby Singapore-based photographer and writer Zhuang Wubin

但与之相对的是，跨文化理解却停滞不前。英国艺术评论家J·J·查尔斯沃思2012年的发表的文章《全球与本地》概括性叙述了这个问题。他认为当代艺术界现在已经非常自信的认为我们已经实现了一种普遍化的理解——他将其称之为艺术界的“世界语”——以至于忽略了这种情景可能导致不同地区的差异和顾虑被忽视，同时导致翻译过程的意义错失愈演愈烈。
Yet in other ways, cross-cultural understanding has stalled. British art critic
J.J. Charlesworth sums up the problem in his 2012 article, “Global versus Local.”3 He argues that the contemporary art world is now so confident that it has achieved a universal understanding, what he calls an art world “Esperanto,” that local differences and concerns may be flattened and on- going failures of translation heightened.

尽管存在上述简单粗暴的风险，但英美摄影界对全球化的西方叙述一直展现出某种形式的“包容性”。主要体现在来自欧美传统“之外”的影像逐渐被引入，与我们熟悉的西方影像并置，对它们的欣赏往往源自于比较和反差所形成的差异——即其陌生并且往往充满异国情调的内容或形式。几十年来，人们对这种方法的问题和不足有不同程度的认识，但在实践中它仍然非常普遍。查尔斯沃斯描述了“文化差异”如何成为“全球认可产品”并在全球艺术市场中作为商品流通。
At the risk of oversimplifying, the western narrative for globalisation in the Anglo-American photography world has been one of “inclusion,” in which images from “outside” the largely European and American tradition have been gradually brought in to sit alongside the familiar western images, where they can be compared and contrasted with a view towards appreciating them, usually for their difference: the unfamiliar and frequently exotic aspects of their content or form. For decades, there have been varying degrees of awareness that this approach is problematic and inadequate, but in practice, it remains very common. Charlesworth describes how “cultural difference” can become a “globally recognized product” that circulates as a commodity within the global art market.

例如，某些画廊早在二十世纪末、二十一世纪初就已经把中国摄影带到了类似于Paris Photo这样的商业摄影展览会，这类作品绝大多数与传统中国艺术息息相关，包括独特的中国山水式构图，对书法、卷轴、屏风的视觉参考等等。就像自17世纪以来被出口到西方的装饰性中国瓷器一样，这些作品可以很容易地因其“中国特色”而受到赞赏和消费。西方观众不需要费太多力气就能理解这些被限定在这种方式中的影像。他们可以欣赏这些作品的优美和异国情调，而无需试图理解其更深层次的艺术史、文学或哲学背景。我在这里仅仅只是以中国摄影作为例子，但我们也可以轻松找到与尼日利亚、日本、印度、沙特阿拉伯、墨西哥摄影等相关的类似案例。 我想强调的是，我绝没有贬低这些作品的审美价值、概念复杂性或政治参与度，我只是指出西方对它们的接受往往会削弱它们在创作背景下可能具有的意义。市场会将艺术作品变成商品，但这个问题并不仅限于市场。
For example, some of the earliest galleries to bring Chinese photography to commercial photography fairs like Paris Photo in the late 1990s and early 2000s specialised in works that engage very explicitly with aspects of traditional Chinese art, featuring distinctively Chinese landscape compositions, visual references to calligraphy, hanging scrolls, folding screens, etc.4 As with the decorative Chinese porcelain that has been exported to the West since the 17th century, these works may easily be admired and consumed for their “Chineseness.” A western viewer does not have to try very hard to understand such images once they are categorized in this limited way. They can enjoy the works for their beauty and exoticism without attempting to understand their deeper art historical, literary or philosophical context. I am using Chinese photography as my example, but could easily find related examples to do with photography from Nigeria, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, etc. I would like to underline that I am in no way undermining the aesthetic merit, conceptual complexity or political engagement of such works, I am merely pointing out that the western reception of them has frequently flattened the meanings they might have held in the context of their making. The market can be expected to reduce art works to commodities, but this problematic extends beyond the market.

为了佐证我的观点，我再讲个有趣的小故事。我曾经参观过一位著名的摄影藏家在伦敦的住所，这位收藏家是几家重要博物馆的购藏委员会成员。她的收藏中有许多非常引人注目的中国作品。每张照片都明确地突出了其中国的身份，景观或文化。虽然我欣赏这些作品，但也忍不住问了这位藏家一个问题：“你会购买一张（西方人）无法立即从视觉上辨认出它来自中国的中国照片么？”她回答到：“那有什么意义呢？”这个回答印证了朱丽叶·哈金(Juliet Hacking，伦敦索斯比艺术学院摄影系主任)的观察，人们有一种普遍预期，照片应该展示国家文化身份的特性，即便摄影艺术熟知的观众也不可免俗。西方观众对西方摄影并不要求这一点，那么为什么他们要求中国摄影做到这一点呢？当国籍被如此突出的时候，有哪些其他意义被忽视了呢？
To provide a supporting anecdote, I once visited the London home of an eminent photography collector, an individual with a place on the acquisitions committee of several major museums. She had a large number of very striking Chinese works in her collection. Each photograph foregrounded its country of origin with explicit reference to Chinese identity, landscape or culture. While I admired these works, they led me to ask the collector a question: “Would you ever purchase a Chinese photograph that could not immediately be visually identified [by a Westerner] as Chinese?” To which her answer was “What would be the point of that?” This comment reinforces Juliet Hacking’s observation that there is a widespread expectation, even among sophisticated audiences, that photographs should demonstrate aspects of national cultural identity.5 Western viewers do not require this of western photography, so why should they demand it of Chinese photography? What other kinds of meaning get pushed to the side when nationality is foregrounded to this extent?

摄影中对于国家身份关注的倾向也同样出现在西方摄影引入到东方的情况。以我个人的经验为例，2015年我应邀为首个在中国巡回展出的英国摄影综述展《时代映像：1960年以来的英国摄影》写一篇目录文章（译注：有趣的是这个展的英文标题是《工作、休息与娱乐：1960年以来的英国摄影》）。这个展览由伦敦摄影师画廊策展，旨在展示英国摄影的水平和多样性。正如标题所示，这个展览还旨在向中国观众展示过去50年间的英国生活方式，传达：“这就是我们的样子，这就是我们的生活。”所包含的摄影创作实践丰富多彩，从商业杂志上的名人肖像到种族骚乱现场的纪实报道，从虚构叙事照片到概念艺术项目。总而言之，这个杂乱的作品集对英国观众来说可能没有太多意义。作为一个在美国出生的作家，让我写一篇文章论述这些图片如何展现了身为英国人的意义是一项奇怪的任务。虽然展览中的许多摄影作品是我之前讲过或写过的，但从来没有采用过“英国特色”作为切入点！当然，我也试图在我的短文中融入其他想法，但我感到沮丧的是，我只能将它们围绕国家身份的主题作为点缀。
The tendency to focus on national identity in photography also applies to Western photography exported to the East. To provide another example from my own experience, in 2015 I was commissioned to write a catalogue essay for the first survey of British photography to tour China: “Work, Rest and Play: British Photography from the 1960s to Today.” This exhibition was curated by The Photographers Gallery, London, in order to showcase the quality and range of British photography. As the title suggests, the show was also intended to show Chinese viewers something about life in Britain over the last 50 years, to say, “This is what we are like. This is who we are.” The photography practices included were very eclectic, ranging from commercial magazine portraits of celebrities to documentary reportage of race riots, from staged narrative photographs to conceptual art projects. In short, this mixed- up collection of works would not have made much sense to British viewers. It was a strange task, especially as a writer born in the U.S.A., to write an essay arguing that these pictures represent aspects of what it means to be British. Many of the photographic projects in the show were ones that I had lectured or written about before—but never through the interpretive lens of “Britishness”! Of course, I also tried to squeeze other ideas into my short essay, but was frustrated that I had to fit them in around the theme of national identity.

如果我们用后殖民主义研究的方式来探讨这个问题，就会意识到被爱德华·赛义德理论化为概括为“东方主义”的倾向依旧显著地存在着，即通过寻求被认为与自己不同或归类为“他者”的文化以提供令人兴奋、发人深省的差异冲击，而来自那个文化背景的摄影师是否希望或打算如此则无关紧要。
To explore this using the terms of post-colonial studies, there is still a strong tendency—theorized by Edward Said as “Orientalism”—to look to cultures perceived as different or “other” to offer an exciting, illuminating jolt of difference, whether or not that is what the photographers of that culture desire or intend. In the last decade, there has been a shift in the discourse of globalization, a new narrative of convergence and homogenization.

在过去的十年里，全球化的话语发生了转变，出现了一种新的趋同化、同质化叙述。这种朝向“大同世界”观念的趋势，受到包括丹尼尔·武科维奇(Daniel Vukovich)在内的汉学家的质疑，可能与东方学一样充斥着误导。因为它从同样的假设出发，即自己看待事物的方式是衡量其他文化的标准。“哦，看，他们变得和我们一样了！”观众可能会这样想，从而错过了进行更深层次理解的机会。
This perceived trend towards “becoming-the-same,” which has been questioned by sinologists including Daniel Vukovich, can be just as misleading as Orientalism, as it starts from the same assumption, that one’s own way of looking at things is the norm against which other cultures should be measured.6 “Oh look—they are becoming just like us!” the viewer might think, and again an opportunity for deeper understanding has been missed.

文化翻译和教学之浅见Some Notes on Cultural Translation and Pedagogy

现在让我聊一聊我在重新思考这种情况时的一些想法，或者能起到一些建设性意义。翻译研究和文化翻译这两个学科的混合尤其有助于我们展开这一探讨，因为它们借鉴了文化研究、社会人类学、行动者网络理论（也被称为“翻译社会学”）、文学理论、哲学和语言学等各领域的研究成果。
And now I turn to some ideas that might be productive in reconsidering the situation. The hybrid disciplines of translation studies and cultural translation are particularly productive for this discussion, drawing as they do on cultural studies, social anthropology, actor-network-theory (also known as “translation sociology”), literary theory, philosophy and linguistics.

遵循霍米·巴巴的观点，我想强调文化翻译更多是由主体的运动而不是客体的运动所引导，是由人而不是影像、文本或艺术品所引导。摄影影像，由于会让人产生其意义一望即知的错觉，因此很容易被从它们的原始语境中被剥离，并通过它们被观看的文化的视角来阅读。阅读关于摄影文化的文本可以丰富我们的理解。加深理解最有效的方式是通过对话和个人经验。书籍和互联网各有其优点，但如果想要加速工作进度，最靠谱的还是行万里路。
Following Homi K. Bhabha, I would like to emphasize that cultural translation is led more by the movement of subjects than objects, of people rather than images, texts or artefacts.8 Photographic images, with their illusion of transparent meaning, are very easy to strip from their original context and read through the lens of the culture in which they are viewed. Reading texts about a photographic culture can round out the picture. Understanding deepens most effectively through dialogue and personal experience. Books and the internet have their merits, but for this work to accelerate, actual people must make actual journeys.

我在2015年和2016年先后两次参加连州摄影节，这段经验给我带来了许多教育和灵感。我看到了许多中国及其他太平洋沿岸地区摄影师的作品，其中很多作品在中国之外从未展出过。它们的风格范围和主题的多样性远超出我的预期，一眼就打动了我。在两次访问中，我在翻译的帮助下做了一些作品集评论。脱离了自己平常的语境以一种不熟悉的方式交流，让我意识到我用来诠释作品的词汇与摄影师们的有很大区别。有些我认为很简单的问题却遇了无法理解的回答，而有些问题则似乎打开了一些我未曾想到的探讨领域。翻译的存在使摄影师们能够在英语词汇的限制之外细腻地解释他们的作品。这个过程也鼓励我以全新的方式去倾听，努力捕捉表达的微妙之处
For me, travelling to the Lianzhou Foto Festival for the first time in 2015 and again in 2016 was an education and an inspiration. I saw work by dozens of Chinese (and other Pacific Rim) photographers, much of which had never been exhibited outside of China. I was immediately struck to see work in a far broader range of styles, with much more diverse subject matter than I expected. As part of these visits, I held a number of portfolio reviews through an interpreter. Removed from my own ordinary context, and communicating in an unfamiliar way, I was brought into confrontation with the fact that my terms of interpretation were rather different than those of the photographers. Some questions that struck me as straightforward were met by incomprehension, others seemed to open up areas of discussion that it might not have occurred to me to pursue. The presence of an interpreter made it possible for photographers to nuance their explanations beyond the limits of their own English vocabulary. The process also encouraged me to listen with fresh ears, straining for subtleties of expression.

这次经历改变了我在西方教学环境中与来自中国学习摄影的留学生互动的方式。我开始让学生们对自己应用的标准提出新的问题。西方艺术学院的解释框架在他们的作品中适用与否？他们还希望以何种方式讨论？近期的研究推翻了中国学生在批判性思维方面比西方同行训练不足的观念。相反，他们可能在大学时具备更高级的批判技能，但在语言和期望方面仍需克服障碍。作为教育者，我们的任务当然怀着知无不言言无不尽的友好心态与他们共同努力，这需要我们双方共同对各自的参考标准互相提出质疑。
This experience has shifted the way that I interact with Chinese photography students when I encounter them in teaching situations in the West. I have begun to ask new questions about what standards the students are applying to themselves. In what ways does the Western art school framework for interpretation fit or not fit their work? How else might they like to discuss it? Recent scholarship debunks the notion that Chinese students are less well- trained for critical thinking than their western counterparts.9 On the contrary, they may arrive at university with more advanced critical skills, but with obstacles to overcome in terms of language and expectations.10 It is surely our task as educators to meet them part way, with a kind of interpretive hospitality, in which we are willing to question our own terms of reference as well as theirs.

法国理论家米歇尔·卡隆（Michel Callon）和布鲁诺·拉图尔（Bruno Latour）在他们关于科学民族志的写作中提出翻译的行为会创造新的网络和权力关系。根据我自己的经验，我意识到当我与来自不同文化背景的摄影学生交流时，在某些领域我是“专家”，可以分享知识和理解；但在某些领域我也需要承认自己的无知，以便让学生自我发现，甚至让我从中学习。
In their writing on the ethnography of science, French theorists Michel Callon and Bruno Latour propose that the act of translation creates new networks and power relationships.12 In my own experience, I have realised that when I am addressing a photography student from a culture different from my own, there will be some areas in which I am “the expert” with knowledge and understanding to share, but that there will be other areas in which it is important for me to admit my ignorance in order to allow students to make their own discoveries, and sometimes to teach me.

法国哲学家雅克·朗西埃(Jacques Rancière)推崇“无知教师”的概念，他愿意承认自己的不精通，使他能够在非母语的情况下进行教学。朗西埃提出了一种可能性，即学生和教师之间权力关系的转变可能促成双方的“智力解放”。我并不是说学生自己就能找到所有的答案，尤其是当他们来自一个从业者对自己的文化历史了解有限的地方，尤其是当他们没有机会以一种强烈、批判性参与的方式追求自我目标的时候。但是，我自己在文化翻译方面的经验让我对不同文化之间存在的意义策略差异眼界大开。我学会了把自己也看作一名学生，这让我与留学生之间的合作变得更加有趣。
French philosopher Jacques Rancière has celebrated the notion of the “ignorant schoolmaster” whose willingness to admit his own lack of mastery allows him to teach without knowledge, even in a language not his own.13 Rancière raises the possibility that a shifted power relationship between student and teacher may lead to an “intellectual emancipation” on both sides. I am not saying that students have all the answers—especially if they come from a place in which practitioners have limited access to their own cultural history—especially if they have not had an opportunity to pursue their subject in an intense, critically engaged way. But my own experiences of cultural translation have opened my eyes to the extent that strategies of meaning differ between cultures. My work with international students has become much more interesting as I have learned to see myself as also a student.

我是否在谈论“放下”西方摄影典范中的影像和文本？近年来，有许多学术著作探讨了西方关于艺术和艺术界的确定性逐渐崩溃的情况。彼得·奥斯本将当代艺术描述为一个权宜的虚构，将不同时间和地点的事件扁平化为一个单一领域的概念。帕梅拉·李描述了全球化如何产生一个多元、动荡、离散的艺术世界，其中一切都可以背平等地消费。事实上，2017年摄影学会议上的许多演讲忽视了“经典”的摄影理论，而是选择了适合当前调查的新方法和新文献。在这种情况下，也许更有效的教学方法恰好是学生们在摄影课程上带着完全不同的背景而来，而不受到我们近年来才开始慢慢形成的影像或文本共识干扰。
Am I talking about “letting go” of a western photographic canon of images and texts? There have been a number of scholarly works in the past few years describing a gradual collapse of Western certainties about art and the art world. Peter Osborne has described contemporary art as a convenient fiction, a notion that flattens various times and locations into a single field.14 Pamela Lee has described the way that globalization produces a plural, unstable, discontinuous art world in which everything is equally available for consumption.15 And indeed, many of the talks at the 2017 Photographies conference neglected the “classics” of photography theory, in favour of new methodologies and new bibliographies as appropriate to the inquiry at hand. In these conditions, perhaps it is actually productive that students are arriving on photography courses with totally disparate backgrounds, without the lexicon of shared images or texts that we expected until very recently?

对于西方摄影教育者的这一转变，一个完全合理的回应是回到批判理论文本的经典作品上——那些在20世纪八九十年代和21世纪初似乎非常适合应对当时学术和政治氛围的文本。但是，我们中的许多人正在放弃这样一个假设，即我们作为摄影教育工作者的工作是向学生呈现一个“主流”文化，让他们逐渐融入其中。我希望能找到更多的方法与学生合作，建立一个第三文化空间，一个挑战跨文化界限的新家园。这可能涉及到一种重建性的去领土化过程，即放弃一些关于我们是谁以及哪些知识领域属于我们的假设。在我的教学中，我越来越感兴趣地从学生自身获取形象、文本、主题和问题，并尝试将它们与我一直看重的经典元素结合起来。将学生视为知识的共同创造者而不是被动接受者的观念并不新鲜。 它起源于20世纪60年代的批判性教育学，如保罗·弗莱雷出版于1968年的《被压迫者的教育学》，以及尼尔·波斯特曼与查尔斯·温加特纳合著的《作为一种颠覆性行为的教学》。女性主义理论家进一步挑战了教育的等级制度，例如，贝尔·胡克斯在她1994年的《超越教学》中主张学生和教育者必须学会“超越”种族、性别和阶级的界限，以追求更具参与性的教学方法。在当前大学的学习成果和评估标准文化中，教育者或许很难保持这种教育激进主义者所倡导的开放思维精神，但这种精神仍然是非常必要的。
One perfectly reasonable response to this turn of affairs by western photography educators would be to fall back on a canon of critical theory texts—the ones that seemed so perfect for navigating the intellectual and political climate of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s. But many of us are letting go of the assumption that our job as photographic educators is to present a “host” culture to which our students will gradually become acculturated. I would like to find more ways to work with our students to build a third cultural space, a new home that challenges intercultural boundaries. This may involve a constructive deterritorialization, a letting go of some assumptions about who we are, and which intellectual territory belongs to us.16 In my own teaching, I am increasingly interested in drawing images, texts, themes and questions from the students themselves, and trying to combine them with elements from a canon that I continue to value. The notion of students as co-creators of knowledge rather than passive recipients is nothing new. It emerged in the critical pedagogy of the 1960s, in texts such as Paulo Freire’s 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity.17 Feminist theorists further extended the challenge to educational hierarchies, with bell hooks, for example, arguing in her 1994 Teaching to Transgress that students—and educators—must learn to “transgress” the boundaries of race, gender and class in pursuit of a more engaged pedagogy.18 Within the current university culture of learning outcomes and assessment criteria it can be difficult for educators to retain the spirit of open-minded inquiry espoused by such educational radicals, but it is needed as much as ever.

困惑，尴尬和失败Confusion, Awkwardness and Failure

我自己对这些问题的认识也经历了许多困惑、尴尬和失败的瞬间。第一次去过连州之后我变得非常渴望对话，于是请求在接下来的一年主持一个以摄影影像与观念的翻译为主题的研讨会。我的提议被接受，并最终成为了一个为期两天的活动：“摄影的概念：在全球化语境中翻译视觉文化（没有找到关于这个研讨会的信息，所以不确定译名准确）”。我预料到这个事件会引发的问题可能要多过回答的问题，而事实上也确实如此。
My own introduction to these issues has included many moments of confusion, awkwardness and failure. After my first trip to Lianzhou Foto, I had become so eager for dialogue that I asked to moderate the following year’s festival symposium on the translation of photographic images and ideas. My proposal was accepted, and culminated in a 2-day event in November 2016: “Concept of Photography: Translating Visual Cultures in the Context of Globalization.” I had anticipated that the event would raise more questions than it answered, and indeed it did.

由于去年的研讨会使用了跨多种语言的同声传译，我曾设想会有一场热烈的对话。然而，除了我自己的发言和摄影师苏尼尔·古普塔(Sunil Gupta)的发言外，为期两天的活动都使用中文进行，没有提供翻译。这使得大部分发言对于来参加摄影节的嘉宾来说如同天书，我也不例外。我坚持参加了整整两天的活动，尽力从语言学意义上的局外人角度体验。中国演讲者展示的许多影像对我来说很熟悉，包括罗伯特·德马奇、保罗·斯特兰德、罗伯特·劳申伯格和芭芭拉·克鲁格等，另外他们也提到了约翰·塔格、维克多·伯金、艾伦·塞库拉，克莱门特·格林伯格、安德烈·巴赞和约翰·萨考斯基等许多我熟悉的名字，但我错过了大部分的知识内容。在几次发言的时候我很幸运地坐在一位休息的中英翻译旁边，小声地从他那儿听到了一些梗概。一位著名的摄影评论家解释说，中国人在20世纪80年代首次翻译西方摄影文本后，开始认真涉足摄影理念。 这些文本的文化背景最初是如此陌生，以至于误解丛生。特别是在选择合适的字眼来翻译专业理论术语方面，问题始终存在。这位评论家举例说，在2007年对于居伊·德波《奇观社会》的中文翻译中，“奇观”竟然被翻译成了“风景”，完全绕过了德波的核心概念。另外我还听到了一个非常有趣的观点，如果我没有理解错的话，这位评论家提到绘画主义、现代主义和后现代主义在当代中国摄影中具有几乎同等的影响力，这在很大程度上是因为历史上所有时期的摄影创作几乎在 1988 年之后同时出现在了中国。
As the previous year’s symposium had involved simultaneous translation in several languages, I had envisioned a lively dialogue. However, aside from my own talk and one by photographer Sunil Gupta, the 2-day event was conducted in Chinese without translation. This made the majority of talks inaccessible to most of the festival’s international visitors, including me. I stayed the full 2 days to make what I could of my experience as linguistic outsider. Many of the images projected by the Chinese speakers were familiar to me (including Robert Demachy, Paul Strand, Robert Rauschenberg and Barbara Kruger), as were many of the names invoked (John Tagg, Victor Burgin and Allan Sekula got mentions, as did Clement Greenberg, André Bazin and John Szarkowski), but I missed most of the intellectual content. For a couple of the talks I was lucky enough to be sitting next to an off-duty Chinese-English translator, and prodded him for whispered highlights. One eminent photography critic explained that the Chinese had begun to engage seriously with photographic ideas when Western photography texts has first been translated into Chinese in the 1980s. The cultural context of these texts was initially so alien that misunderstandings were rife. Problems persist in particular around the choice of characters to translate specialist theoretical terms. The critic noted, for example, that in the 2007 Chinese translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the character used for “spectacle” is the one commonly used for “landscape,” short-circuiting Debord’s central concept entirely. I was especially interested to learn (if I understood correctly) the critic describing pictorialism, modernism and postmodernism as having equal validity in contemporary Chinese photography, in large part because all eras of historical photographic production came into visibility at once post- 1988.

另一个让我格外感兴趣的事情是，有一位中国艺术史学家解释说西方摄影特别关注存在、缺位和瞬时性，这是因为基督徒相信圣灵的真实存在，相信在圣餐中面包就是基督的身体。虽然这个理论在西方摄影批评中并不常见，但就西方评论家和历史学家经常对亚洲摄影所做的文化假设而言，它似乎完全合理。
Another moment of fascination for me was when a Chinese art historian explained that Western photography is particularly concerned with presence, absence and ephemerality because Christians believe in the real presence of the Holy Spirit and in the transubstantiation of bread into the body of Christ in Holy Communion. While this theory is not often encountered in Western photographic criticism, it seems a perfectly reasonable projection in relation to the kinds of cultural assumptions that Western critics and historians routinely make about Asian photography.

整个事情还有一个超现实的后记。在我去连州的几个月后，我得知我在2016年出版的中译版著作被停止发行。令人啼笑皆非的是，就目前的沟通结果，书中出现了许多问题，其中之一是使用了同一个词来翻译英文单词“object”和“subject”，这个选择严重削弱了书中对摄影客观性的讨论。我听说这个译本后来已经进行了修订和重新发行。我不会因为这些沟通掉链子的时刻过于气馁，因为它们都以各自的方式揭示了问题的本质，都有值得我学习的地方。
The event had a surreal postscript. A few months after my trip to Lianzhou, I learned that the 2016 Chinese translation of my book had been withdrawn from circulation. Ironically, in light of the current discussion, one of the issues at stake was the use of the same character to translate the English words “object” and “subject,” a choice that greatly undermined the book’s discussion of photographic objectivity. I gather the translation has since been revised and re-issued. I refuse to be too discouraged by any of these moments of breakdown in communication, because they are each revealing in their own way, and each had something to teach me.

作为研讨会的一个积极成果，一位台湾摄影师在我发表演讲——即本文的早期版本——后走到我面前，说：“没错，没错！你说到点子上了。”他告诉我，他在美国获得了摄影学士学位，在那里他一直感到被人议论和贬低。然而，在荷兰攻读硕士学位时，他感受到的教育模式则远没有那么等级森严，并且感到自己的文化背景在小组讨论中得到了重视。这并不是要争论一个国家的教育体系就一定比另一个国家的教育体系更加具有等级制度——这种差异也有可能是一个机构与另一个机构之间的差异，甚至是一个导师与另一个导师之间的差异。但我想说的是，对于国际学生来说，更友好的教育文化会更有建设意义。
As a positive outcome of the symposium, one Taiwanese photographer came up to me after my presentation (an early version of this paper) and said, “Yes, yes! You’re on to something.” He told me that he had done a BA in Photography in the U.S.A. where he had felt constantly talked down to, patronised and belittled. But that in his MA in the Netherlands, he had experienced a far less hierarchical educational model and had felt his cultural background was valued as part of the group discussion. This is not to argue that one country’s educational system is universally more hierarchical than the other’s—it is also possible that some of this difference lay in the difference between one institution and another, or even one instructor and another. The point I took to heart was that a more hospitable educational culture felt far more constructive to an international student.

翻译理论之间存在许多相互排斥的观点。传统观点认为译者需要寻求最佳的文字对等关系以在目标语言中再现原文的意义，但是也有反逐字翻译的观点则更强调翻译文本的实际用途，以及强调翻译是一种有意识、有目的的改写。当翻译的目的是弥合文化差距的时候，这种翻译可能被称为多元文化或跨文化翻译。这些理论如何在翻译照片和摄影理念时发挥作用？由于照片是视觉符号，所以它们通常被认为是一种“通用语言”，可以自由地向来自任何文化背景的观众提供内容。当然，该领域的专家都知道这是一种非常幼稚的观点，它没有考虑到影像所蕴含的多层次意义以及影像所处的交流语境。照片通常需要解释，即使对于在同一文化中的观众来说也是如此，这本身就是一种“翻译”。 在当前全球化的环境下，我们需要同时接受过视觉素养和解释能力培训的人，这不仅是为了享受丰富的艺术和娱乐文化，也是为了有效地相互交流。摄影教育可以为这些技能提供良好的培训。
There are many competing theories of translation.19 Against the traditional view that the translator should simply seek the best word-for-word equivalence to reproduces the meaning of the original text in the target language, there are less literal theories that emphasize the actual use to which the translated text is going to be put, and theories that emphasize translation as a form of conscious and deliberate re-writing. When produced with the intention of mediating the gap between cultures, such translation might be referred to as multicultural or intercultural. How do these theories come to bear in the translation of photographs and of photographic ideas? Because they are visual signs, photographs are often perceived to be a “universal language” that offer their content freely to a viewer from any cultural context. Of course, specialists in the field know that this is a very naive view, which fails to account for the layers of meaning embedded in images and in the contexts in which they circulate. Photographs frequently require explanation—itself a form of “translation”—even for viewers within the same culture in which they were produced. Within the current conditions of globalization, we need people trained in visual literacy and interpretive sophistication, not only to enjoy a rich culture of art and entertainment, but also to communicate effectively with one another. Photographic education can provide excellent training in these skills.

摄影文化翻译的发展需要通过摄影师——包括学生、策展人和学者们相互沟通、增进了解实现。摄影教育在其中发挥着着关键的作用，尤其是当教育者愿意放弃现有的权力关系，转而采用诸如如朗西埃的“无知教师”或霍克斯的“超越教学”等其它模式进行；或者当团体能够建立自己的知识文化，将东西方影像和文本与团体兴趣相结合的时候。以西方艺术史和批评理论为基础的理论主导亟待被打破。
The cultural translation of photography develops through photographers (including students), curators and scholars developing multiple fluencies and hybrid perspectives.20 Photographic education plays a key role, especially where educators are willing to relinquish existing power relationships in favour of alternative models, such as Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster,” or hooks’ “teaching to transgress” or where groups are able to build their own intellectual culture, combining images and texts from East and West with those that emerge from the interests of the group. The dominance of theories grounded in western art history and critical theory still begs to be disrupted.

霍米·巴巴将文化翻译描述为一个过程，而不是一个结果。这并不是一个容易的过程，也不是一个舒适的过程。为了使摄影教育继续具有现实意义，为了使新的创作范式能够不再一味迎合摄影市场及其对异国情调的渴望，摄影师、策展人、教育者和学者有必要勇敢的走向一个充满质疑、不安和位置的边缘地带。
Homi Bhabha describes cultural translation as a process, rather than a product. And the process is not always easy, or comfortable. For photography education to continue to be relevant and in order for new paradigms to evolve beyond the powerful pull of the photography market and its appetite for the exotic, it is necessary for photographers, curators, educators and scholars to embrace a margin of questioning, awkwardness and unknowing.