附文 – 马丁帕尔的舞厅 | Martin Parr’s Danceteria
你觉得你会跳舞吗？我猜想，我们大多数人也是如此，在马丁·帕尔的糖果世界里，显然每个人都能做到。毕竟，正是帕尔的祖国英国开启了整个电视“真人秀”大赛热潮，这给美国带来了“美国偶像”、“与明星共舞”、“顶级厨师”、“T台计划”以及“是的，你认为你能跳舞”所有这些节目都带有英国口音，无论是字面上的还是比喻上的，以及周六晚上在布莱克浦或布莱顿举行的一场跳舞会带来的观众自由参与的感觉。
并不是说帕尔照片中的所有角色都有资格登上电视。这就是重点：他的剧组大多是狂欢者和追求者，他们对专业舞蹈就像快照对艺术一样，也就是说，他们在一个长长的图腾柱的下端，但对出现在顶端的故事至关重要。在摄影中，快照是一种当地传统的一部分，它对艺术的影响可以通过它与绘画和其他“传统”表现方法的距离来衡量。在舞蹈中，我们不太清楚，比如说，嘻哈或踢踏舞可能与芭蕾舞有什么直接关系，但从低到高的连续体仍然存在——看看特里莎·布朗、特伊拉·塔普和马克·莫里斯等后现代舞蹈。
然而，舞蹈应该被视为帕尔画作的借口，就像食物和停车场是帕尔其他系列作品的借口一样。这些照片的真正意义似乎有两个方面：第一，极端摄影的乐趣，过度活跃，通常是超彩色的，第二，人类不可抑制的善良本性。帕尔在这里展示的独特天赋是，他喜欢在细节、手势、表情、服装和颜色中寻找荒谬。“乍一看，他的照片似乎有些夸张，甚至荒诞，”策展人托马斯·韦斯基在摄影师网站上的一篇文章中写道，这大概意味着我们应该把这句话当作一种赞美。这些怪诞的故事大多与帕尔对镜头、胶片、闪光灯的选择以及与拍摄对象的距离有关，但它也构成了帕尔独有的世界观。
帕尔的古怪世界已经伴随我们20多年了，至少可以追溯到《最后的度假胜地》（1986年）一书中的彩色图片。这本书关注的是在一个摇摇欲坠的海滩小镇上休闲的英国人，并使他登上了艺术世界的版图。尽管《最后的度假胜地》中的照片很独特，但它们仍保留着一种纪录片的风格：我们可以感觉到，仿佛一扇门已经打开，展示了一种奇怪的文化，人们在进行奇怪的社会仪式。这些人在很大程度上讲的是我们自己的语言，他们的行为是我们自己可能参与的行为，这意味着他们的奇怪之处并不遥远，而是熟悉的，因此很迷人。
1994年，帕尔被选为著名的摄影记者合作机构马格南图片社的成员，这表明他的一些同行认为他的作品是基于事实的，具有新闻价值。他早期的黑白作品发表在《坏天气》（1982年）和《晴朗的一天》（1984年）两本书中，这使纪录片之间的联系更加清晰，只是因为它们消除了帕尔标志性鲜明色彩的干扰。但正是这些色彩迷惑了我们，使画面不可抗拒。它们是现实生活中遇到柯达彩色胶片的结果，而不是Photoshop的一些把戏，这些把戏可能无法让它们真实地生活，但意味着它们真实地体现了柯达的精神。
自20世纪80年代初以来，帕尔拍摄了数百张人们跳舞的照片，它们构成了一个时间胶囊，以及一个国际文化舞蹈派对。莫里斯舞、广场舞和交谊舞代表着持续的传统，而朋克和摇滚乐则展示了当时最新的反叛风格。人们还必须注意到，他的许多对象本身并不是字面意义上的舞蹈，而是准备好跳舞，或观看舞蹈，或参与我们称之为求爱舞蹈的常年表演。所有这些舞蹈行为都蕴含着人性的喜剧，或者也许是一个辉煌的悲喜剧，感谢马丁·帕尔把它们展示给我们。
So you think you can dance? So do most of us, I suspect, and in Martin Parr's confectionary universe apparently everyone can. It is Parr's native Britain, after all, that started the whole television "reality" competition craze that has given America "American Idol," "Dancing with the Stars," "Top Chef," "Project Runway" and yes, "So You Think You Can Dance." All these shows come with an English accent, literally or figuratively, and a sense of freewheeling audience participation straight out of a Saturday night dancehall in Blackpool or Brighton.
Not that all the characters in Parr's pictures have the chops to get themselves on the telly. And that's the point: his cast of mostly revelers and aspirers are to professional dancing what snapshots are to art, which is to say they are at the lower end of a long totem pole yet prove essential to the story that emerges at the top. In photography, the snapshot is part of a vernacular tradition whose influence on art can be measured by its distance from painting and other "traditional" methods of representation. In dance, it's less clear how, say, hip hop or skiffle dancing might relate directly to ballet, but a continuum from low to high exists nonetheless--witness the Postmodern choreography of the likes of Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, and Mark Morris.
Dance, however, should be considered only a pretext for Parr's pictures, just as food and parking places have been for other series of his work. What these photographs really seem to be about is twofold: first, the delights of photography in extremis, hyperactive and usually hyper- colored, and second, the irrepressible good-naturedness of humanity. Parr's particular talent on display here is his penchant for finding absurdity in details, gestures, expressions, clothing, colors. "At first glance, his photographs seem exaggerated or even grotesque," writes curator Thomas Weski in a passage found on the photographer's website, which presumably means we should take this remark as a compliment. Much of the grotesquerie has to do with Parr's choices of lens, film, flash lighting, and distances from his subjects, but it also constitutes a worldview that is Parr's alone.
Parr's oddball world has been with us for more than 20 years, going back at least to the color pictures in the book "The Last Resort" (1986), which focused on Britons at leisure at a crumbling beach town and which put him on the art-world map. As idiosyncratic as the pictures in The Last Resort are, though, they retain a claim to being documentary: we can feel as if a door has been opened to reveal a strange culture of people who practice curious social rituals. That these people for the most part speak our own language, and that their behaviors are ones we may have engaged in ourselves, means that their oddity is not remote but familiar, and therefore charming.
In 1994 Parr was voted into membership in Magnum, the famed cooperative agency for photojournalists, which suggests that some number of his peers consider his work to be based in fact, and newsworthy. His early black-and-white work, published in the books "Bad Weather" (1982) and "A Fair Day" (1984), make the documentary connection clearer, if only because they eliminate the distraction of Parr's trademark vivid hues. But it is precisely those hues that beguile us and make the pictures irresistible. They are the result of real life meeting Kodak color film, not some Photoshop trickery, which may not make them true to life but means they are true to its spirit.
There are hundreds of photographs of people dancing that Parr has taken since the early 1980s, and they constitute a time capsule of sorts as well as an international cultural dance party. Morris dancing, square dancing, and ballroom dancing represent ongoing tradition, while punks and rockers demonstrate what were, at the time, the latest in rebellious styles. One also has to notice that many of his subjects are not themselves dancing in the literal sense but ready to dance, or watching a dance, or engaged in that perennial display we call a courtship dance. There is a human comedy to all these dance behaviors, or perhaps a glorious tragicomedy, and thanks go to Martin Parr for showing it to us.
Andy Grundberg