序言 | Foreword

GEOFF DYER

于畅 译

猎奇是摄影界一贯的传统，这一传统几乎可以追溯到摄影机问世之初。在周游欧洲大陆之后，早期摄影家们又把目光瞄准了“东方”。自19世纪50年代以来，弗朗西斯·弗里斯(Francis Frith)等一批摄影家相继拖着笨重的摄影机器，远涉重洋，奔赴地中海西岸，乃至更远的地方。就这样，金字塔等各种异国风情的照片在欧洲渐渐流行开来，大大刺激了人们出行的慾望。这便是摄影的无穷吸引力和魅力所在——召唤人们身临其境去感受一番。当然，人们去旅游的动机不仅限于此。虽说照片捕捉到的仅仅是冰山一角，但这些景观却能在很大程度上左右游客的行程，似沙漠中的绿洲，又似长途跋涉中遇到的客栈，引导人们不断地去探索，去发现。相对于普通的旅游者，那些喜欢探险的旅游者则更愿意到人烟稀少的地方去旅游。然而当越来越多的人开始踏进这些原本不为人知的地方时，这些地方也就不可避免地会变成旅游景点。华兹华斯(Wordsworth)的田园诗歌吸引了大批游客到湖区游玩，然而他对却对此相当不满，认为游客的到来破坏了湖区的宁静。同他一样，探险旅游者也对接踵而至追随他们足迹的游客颇有微词，殊不知，他们自己才是破坏原始生态和人文环境的始作俑者。

当旅游变得越来越便捷、轻松和廉价时，环境问题——或者我们可以称之为旅游综合征——也就变得越来越严峻。不仅是环境问题，过去，只有那些热衷冒险又富有智慧的人才敢去埃及旅行，保罗·法瑟尔(Paul Fussell)在《去国外(Abroad)》一书中认为这样高效率和模式化的飞机旅游时代的到来——大约始于1957——是人类历史上一个有趣的时刻，标志著人类从主动旅游向被动旅游的转变。他的说法可能有一定的合理性，但不可否认，飞机的确给人们的出行带来了极大的便捷，正如盖瑞·温诺格兰德(Garry Winogrand)六七十年代的机场系列摄影作品所展示的那样，飞机旅游时代的到来，大大增加了人们出门旅游的机会，极大地扩展了他们的视野。

马丁·帕尔的《小世界》摄影系列既对旅游业发展给人类带来的双重影响进行了总结，又对其未来发展前景进行了探讨。当中涉及的有些地方弗西斯等人以前也拍过（例如金字塔），但这些地方最终没有像温诺格兰德那样给人带来兴奋，而却都变成了让人失望而回的地方。记得那是1965年，父母带著年仅七岁的我去伦敦一周游。期间有一天我们专门乘地铁去希思罗机场参观，我们并不是乘飞机出发去哪里，只是纯粹去看希思罗机场。对我们而言，机场不单单是一个送别亲人朋友的地方，其本身就是个旅游景点。9.11事件后，普通出行者（商务舱或头等舱乘客除外）的航空旅游受到了极大的限制，更雪上加霜的是——确切的说，是更让我们有负罪感的是——我们越来越清楚地认识到了发展旅游业对生态环境造成的破坏，航空旅游势必会加剧全球变暖。这样看来费尔南多·佩索阿（Fernando Pessoa）选择呆在家里哪儿也不去似乎是相当明智的：“究竟什么是旅游？旅游有什么用？哪里的日落还不都是一样的？何苦非要跑到君士坦丁堡去看日落呢？”

旅游当然不仅仅是为了去看日落。如果你去君士坦丁堡看日落——或是别的地方也好——你就会发现那里的一切都和家里是如此的不同。20世纪50年代，瑞士旅游家罗伯特·弗兰克(Robert Frank)游历美洲大陆，旨在记录“美国文明的诞生及其向全球的传播。”弗兰克的想法是对的：在长达40年的摄影生涯中，帕尔也对这一现象深有体会，美国的资本主义文明几乎已经遍及全球的各个角落。（他的作品在这里不再是鼓励人们出行，恰恰相反，他认为我们完全没必要非去埃及旅游——还得提心吊胆地怕遇上恐怖袭击——目的仅仅是为了感受东方文化；想体验东方文化去拉斯维加斯一趟就行，那里也有卢克索(Luxor)的金字塔。要想摆脱这种千篇一律的全球化景象，寻求不一样的体验，我们就得去更远的地方。

我们在感慨原始文明的被破坏时往往忘了，其实我们人类自己才是这些破坏的罪魁祸首。无论你是去哪里旅游，那里总会有各种各样的服务在等着你——即使有些并不太符合你个人的需求。几年前我同妻子去斋沙默尔(Jaisalmer)（位于拉贾斯坦邦沙漠Rajasthan）旅游，妻子说这个地方像卡尔维诺(Calvino)式的具有与世隔绝的旷世之美，令她难以忘怀。然而仅仅10年以后，斋沙默尔竟变得面目全非了。空气中到处瀰漫的是铜臭味，活脱脱一个卡姆登集市（Camden market）的翻版。正如原始印第安人会用土地换取其他部落的廉价首饰那样，斋沙默尔人把自己宝贵的文化弃如敝屣，反而去追求那些毫无价值的庸俗之物——因而作为游客，我们有种被欺骗的感觉。

当然，并不是所有的旅游景点都像斋沙默尔那样彻底地商业化和旅游化。但正如玛丽·麦卡锡(Mary McCarthy)在将近一个世纪之前写的那样：“我们不能说旅游化的威尼斯就不是真正的威尼斯了，其他旅游城市——罗马、佛罗伦萨、那不勒斯也是一样。旅游化的威尼斯才是真正的威尼斯……威尼斯本身就像明信片里那样多姿多彩，引人入胜。”

威尼斯也许是一个极端的例子。在罗马或佛罗伦萨，游客大概会感到安慰，因为很多人跟自己一样做著同样的事，观光、拍照等等。令人懊恼的是，一餐馆专门推出 “游客菜单”但却大受欢迎。冒著被指责为种族歧视者的危险，马丁·埃米斯（Martin Amis）戏谑地称日本人为“照相狂日本佬”。用他的话来说——日本游客对拍照的热情令人咂舌，他们旅游的真正乐趣不在于旅游本身，而是制造证据——为自己拍照——证明自己到此一游。（这么说，我似乎又把我自己放到了一个文化制高点，以优越的价值观和洞察力自居，去批判他国文化了）。

比起普通的图片，帕尔的图片在逻辑上更深一层：拍摄那些正在拍照的人。在这一点上，《小世界》系列和托马斯·斯特鲁斯(Thomas Struth)的大画幅系列可以一比，我们通过斯特鲁斯的图片看游客的同时他们也在看名画（我们往往忽略了，其实这样满是游客的场景也是景点的一部分）。两者所不同的是，那些名画的伟大和光环在冥思过程中还能幸存，但是在帕尔照片里 “地点”和“游客”的组合却只能互相贬值。我们可以说帕尔用的是隐晦的方式表达他的思想——或者说是较为温和的方式——他对唐·德里罗(Don DeLillo)在《名人们(The Names)》 中的观点极为推崇：

旅游就是变成傻瓜的过程。别人希望你是傻瓜。东道国的一切都是为傻瓜游客量身定做的。在这里你会茫然地到处瞎逛，眯着眼睛吃力地看地图。你不知道如何跟人当地人打交道，你不知道路线，不知道你的钱在这里能买多少东西，你不知道该吃什么、怎么吃，甚至不知道时间。变傻瓜就是旅游的模式、标准和常态。

同德里罗一样，帕尔对这种变成傻瓜的过程是相当享受，既没有感觉到受伤，也没有从道德上对之进行批判。他爱死旅游了，他能从这个过程中获得很大的快感。

让批评家去解释笑话是很困难的，同样，我们也不能奢望让摄影师去逗乐观众（这可能与图片的可复制性有关；试想，有多少笑话能经得住无限的重复？）但摄影师可以很有趣。世界上最有趣的摄影师应该是亨利· 布列松·卡蒂埃（Henri Cartier-Bresson）（温诺格兰德稍逊于他），他如果尝试彩照的话，大概也会用到一些同帕尔类似的策略吧。然而具有讽刺意味的是，在1995年巴黎举行的《小世界》系列的首次展览会上，卡蒂埃·布列松对帕尔说了一句这样的话“你一定是从另一个星球来的”。通过观察二人的作品我们不难发现，布勒松和帕尔这两个来自“两个星球”的摄影师在某些方面有着惊人的一致。帕尔从看似随机的色彩选择中发现了如何表达韵律和双关意义的方法，而布列松则用图片的几何结构将这些意义表达了出来。

帕尔摄影的成功是建立在讽刺照片中人物的基础之上的吗？这样做合理吗？想想战地记者们常发回的那些专门捕捉死亡、残废和人在水深火热里挣扎之类的特写，帕尔的小嘲讽往往会被忽略（说起战争，可别忘了，帕尔工作的地方都是一些广为人知的景点，也就是越南人所说的停火区，他是享有豁免权的）那些有幸被拍进照片的人在看到这些照片时会一眼认出他们自己吧。虽然他们是自愿花钱出来的，但观光也好——或就整个旅游活动来说，有时候并非是一种享受——而是受罪——一定程度上是由于其他游客的存在（正如司机会抱怨堵车一样，敏感的游客也常常会发牢骚“这个地方游客太多了”）。还有就是旅游花费了，即使你去相对廉价的景点，也难免花钱如流水。虽都过去快40年了，但我父亲至今仍然对杜莎夫人蜡像馆门口那昂贵的巧克力脆皮雪糕耿耿于怀，当时差点就忍痛买了。就这点来说，父亲同戴维·赫伯特·劳伦斯(D.H. Lawrence)挺像的，后者在《大海与撒丁岛(Sea and Sardinia)》一书中对（旅游时）被宰愤怒不已——“我讨厌死里拉(liras，意大利货币)这个词了。到处听到的都是里拉——里拉——里拉——除此之外就没有别的。那个到处是柏树和橘树，浪漫又诗意的意大利已经不复存在了。意大利快被里拉堵窒息了：破烂、倒人胃口的钱发出浓重的肮脏气味，像油腻的烟一样难闻。”

你别无选择：无论是自助旅游还是跟团旅游，只要你是去旅游，就得不停地掏腰包。说来也怪，旅行中常常会碰到的譬如排长队、倒时差、恶心反胃等麻烦似乎丝毫阻挡不了人们出行的热情。菲利普·拉金(Philip Larkin，英国现代诗人)对旅游并不见得有多喜欢，但他却会每年带著母亲去英格兰度假一周（他对“国外”景点不大信任）。由此他提出一种新的理论，他认为“度假”是从中世纪的朝圣演变而来的，由于平日里的生活过于幸福和舒适，人们选择“度假”以作为一种赎罪。

这就是《小世界》图片里所呈现的现代社会形态： 旅游——一种没有信仰的朝圣苦旅。或许，明年我真的可以考虑去麦加看看。

The tradition of photographing exotic places reaches back almost to the invention of the medium. As the Grand Tour was extended to take in ‘the Orient’ so, in the 1850s, photographers such as   Francis Frith lugged their bulky equipment to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Once the resulting pictures of the pyramids and other wonders became widely available the desire to go to these places increased. Such was - such is - the allure and promise of photographs that people wanted to see the precise spots shown in the pictures. Part of the motive for traveling was, as it were, to experience the photographs on site, for real. Of course, there was a lot to see that hadn't been photographed but the places in the frame served as oases or taverns, nodes that visibly determined one's itinerary. Adventurous travellers naturally wanted to get off this pre-beaten track. By so doing, the places they visited gradually became part of the track. Just as Wordsworth complained about the growing numbers of visitors to the Lake District that his poetry had attracted so travellers to out of the way places began to lament the tourists that came after them.

As travelling has become quicker, easier and cheaper so this problem - or syndrome - has grown more acute. Whereas it once required a considerable effort of will and some ingenuity to get to Egypt, Paul Fussell, in his book Abroad, thinks that the coming of efficient, uniform jet travel - which "began in earnest around 1957" - "represents an interesting moment in the history of human passivity." Maybe so but, as Garry Winogrand's airport photographs of the 1960s and 70s attest, it also heralded a great democratic expansion of the opportunity horizon.

The pictures in Martin Parr's Small World both sum up this contradictory history and depict what might turn out to be its terminal phase. They show the places photographed by the likes of Frith (the pyramids) and they show how the excitement and promise of Winogrand's pictures has become a source of cramped frustration. When I was seven, in 1965, my parents and I went to London for a week's holiday. One day, as part of this vacation, we took the tube out to Heathrow, not to fly somewhere, just to see the airport. For us it was not a place of departure but a tourist destination in its own right. With the inconvenience of air travel drastically increased in the wake of 9/11 the average traveller i.e. anyone not in Business or First - dreads going to the airport. To add insult to injury - or, more exactly, guilt to discomfort - we are now acutely conscious of the cost to the environment, of the way that air travel is contributing to global warming. In this context a stay-at-home like Fernando Pessoa seems almost visionary: "What is travel and what use is it? All sunsets are sunsets; there is no need to go and see one in Constantinople."

It's not just the sunsets. When people do travel to Constantinople - or anywhere else for that matter they can increasingly expect to find many of the things and conveniences taken for granted at home. Back in the 1950s the Swiss tourist Robert Frank travelled through America photographing "the kind of civilization born here and spreading everywhere." Frank was right: forty years down the line Parr finds bits and pieces of the American imperium everywhere. (He also records the contrary tendency Whereby one no longer has to travel to Egypt - with the attendant threat of terror - to experience the orient; it can be found in Las Vegas, in the shape of the Luxor.) In order to escape the tentacles of this homogenizing 'civilisation' it is necessary to travel further and further afield. And by so doing you drag those tentacles after you. We are all responsible for the ruination we lament. Wherever you travel some kind of industry develops to cater for you - even if it's not the kind of catering you, personally, were hoping for. A couple of years ago my wife and I travelled to Jaisalmer in the desert of Rajasthan, a place she remembered as being almost Calvino-esque in its isolated beauty. In the decade since her first visit, however, it had been incrementally trashed. With every wall festooned with Indo tat - sarongs, knick-knacks, junk - it resembled nothing else so much as a fortified reincarnation of Camden market. In a cruel twist to the familiar story of how the indigenous people of a place ('Indians' as they were referred to throughout the Americas) traded the wealth of their land for a few worthless trinkets, the people of Jaisalmer, having put their heritage in hock, were left selling worthless trinkets that no one wanted - and, as a result, we, the tourists, felt cheated by the commerce that had sprung up to pander to us.

The effects of tourism are, of course, not uniform. Not all places have given themselves over entirely to tourism. But, as Mary McCarthy wrote almost half a century ago, "there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities - Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice is Venice... Venice is a folding picture-postcard of itself." Venice is an extreme case. Even in Rome or Florence, however, visitors feel reassured by the way there are so many others doing, seeing - and photographing - the same things. Off-putting to some, a restaurant offering a 'Tourist Menu' is tempting to many. At the risk of being racist, the Japanese - the "lens-faced Japanese", in Martin Amis's phrase - seem to take particular comfort in being photographed in places where everyone else is being photographed. People go to places not to see the places but to obtain evidence - photographs of themselves - of having been there. Actually, this argument has been rehearsed so many times that it's a negative version of the same tendency. By making the point I am effectively making a record of myself standing in front of a cultural edifice signifying superior worth and discernment.)

Parr takes things a logical stage further: photographing people being photographed and taking photographs. In this respect the Small World pictures stand comparison with the large-scale images by Thomas Struth in which we look at visitors looking at famous works of art (which, lest we forget, are also tourist attractions). The difference is that whereas in Struth's photographs the greatness - or aura or whatever you want to call it - of these artworks survives the process of mediation, in Parr's 'place' and visitor work to their mutual diminution. Tacitly - or maybe not even tacitly - he endorses the verdict of the narrator in Don DeLillo's The Names: "Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm."

Like DeLillo, Parr is not scathing or moralistic about this perceived failing. He enjoys it too much for that. There's too much mileage in it. It is as hard for photographers to be funny as it is for a critic to explain a joke (this probably has something to do with the medium's defining quality of reproducibility; how many jokes can withstand infinite repetition?) but they can be witty. The wittiest photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson (with Winogrand a close second) who, if he had worked in colour, might have relied on some of the same devices as Parr. Ironically, it was at the opening of Small World in 1995 at Centre Nationale de la Photographie, Paris, that Cartier-Bresson told Parr that he must be "from a different planet." One sees what he means but one also sees that, at some point in their orbits, their two planets are thrown into unexpected alignment. In the random accidents of colour Parr contrives to find a version of the rhymes and puns that Cartier-Bresson discovered in the fleeting symmetries of pictorial geometry.

Are Parr's visual jokes at the expense of the people depicted? Is he fair? In the context of a world in Which war photographers are snatching images of death, maiming, grief and suffering, Parr's trespasses are easily forgiven. (Having mentioned war it's worth remembering that, since Parr works in some of the most intensively photographed spots on earth, he can probably claim immunity on the grounds that they are, to use a phrase from Vietnam, free-fire zones.) I suspect, also, that the people in the photographs would recognise themselves and their fellow-travellers. They would agree that, although they have chosen and paid to come to these places, sight-seeing in particular and holidaying generally are often the opposite of fun - partly because of all the other tourists. (Like car drivers moaning about traffic, the discerning tourist often complains that a place is 'too touristy.) And the money, even in supposedly cheap places, slips through your fingers like water. Forty years on, my father is still traumatised by the extraordinary price of the choc-ice we almost bought outside Madame Tussaud's during that trip to London. In this respect he has something in common with D. H. Lawrence who, in Sea and Sardinia, is in a state of constant fury about being overcharged: "I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras…. Liras - liras - liras - nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog."

There is no way round it: to travel, either as backpacker or package tourist, is to be forced into being an incessant consumer. Factor in queues, hassle, jetlag and tummy upsets and it's a wonder, even now, when travel has become so easy, that people still want to do it. Philip Larkin certainly didn't want to, but he did consent, every year, to take his mother away for a dismal week somewhere in England (he didn't believe in "abroad'). The experience led him to develop "a theory [that] 'holidays' evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one's daily life."

That's what the pictures in Small World depict: the form and state of modern, faithless pilgrimage I think, next year, I might try Mecca.

GEOFF DYER