Excerpt：In Plato's Cave (在柏拉圖的洞穴裡)

從約翰‧伯格的《觀看的方式》、《另一種影像敘事》、《觀看的視界》，或是傑夫．代爾的《持續進行的瞬間》，似乎又會重新回到了蘇珊．桑塔格的《論攝影》。
我相信《論攝影》這本書必然成為經典中的經典，而第一章節〈在柏拉圖的洞穴裡〉也就始終佔據著首要閱讀的優勢地位吧 !

書名：論攝影 (On Photography)
篇名：在柏拉圖的洞穴裡 (In Plato's Cave)
作者：蘇珊．桑塔格 (Susan Sontag)
譯者：黃燦然

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about every­thing has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photo­graphic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.
人類無可救贖地留在柏拉圖的洞穴裡，老習慣未改，依然在並非真實本身而僅是真實的影像中陶醉。但是，接受照片的教育，已不同於接受較古老、較手藝化的影像的教育。首先，周遭的影像更繁多，需要我們去注意。照片的庫存開始於一八三九年，此後，幾乎任何東西都被拍攝過，或看起來如此。攝影之眼的貪婪，改變了那個洞穴——我們的世界——裡的幽禁條件。照片在教導我們新的視覺準則的同時，也改變並擴大我們對什麼才值得看和我們有權利去看什麼的觀念。照片是一種觀看的語法，更重要的，是一種觀看的倫理學。最後，攝影企業最輝煌的成果，是給了我們一種感覺，以為我們可以把整個世界儲藏在我們腦中——猶如一部圖像集。
(p.027)

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doc­tored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, pro­jected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
拍攝就是占有被拍攝的東西。它意味著把你自己置於與世界的某種關係中，這是某種讓人覺得像知識，因而也像權力的關係。第一次掉進異化的例子現已臭名昭著，就是使人們習慣於把世界簡化為印刷文字。據認為，這種異化催生了浮士德式的過剩精力和導致心靈受摧殘，而這兩者又是建造現代、無機的社會所需的。但相對於攝影影像而言，印刷這一形式在濾掉世界、在把世界變成一個精神物件方面，似乎還不算太奸詐。如今，攝影影像提供了人們了解過去的面貌和現在的情況的大部分知識。對一個人或一次事件的描寫，無非是一種解釋，手工的視覺作品例如繪晝也是如此。攝影影像似乎並不是用於表現世界的作品，而是世界本身的片斷，它們是現實的縮影，任何人都可以製造或獲取。
照片篡改世界的規模，但照片本身也被縮減、被放大、被裁剪、被修飾、被竄改、被裝扮。它們衰老，被印刷品常見的病魔纏身；它們消失；它們變得有價值，被買賣；它們被複製。照片包裝世界，自己似乎也招致被包裝。它們被夾在相冊裡，被裱起來然後架在桌面上，被釘在牆上，被當作幻燈片來放映。報紙雜誌刊登它們；警察按字母次序排列它們；博物館展覽它們；出版社彙編它們。
(p.028~029)

Recently, photography has become almost as widely prac­ticed an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
最近，攝影做為一種娛樂，已變得幾乎像色情和舞蹈一樣廣泛——這意味著攝影如同所有大眾藝術形式，並不是被大多數人當成藝術來實踐的。它主要是一種社會儀式，一種防禦焦慮的方法，一種權力工具。
(p.034)

As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symboli­cally, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family's photo­graph album is generally about the extended family – and, often, is all that remains of it.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.
隨著核心家庭這一幽閉恐懼症的單元從規模大得多的家族凝聚體分裂出來，攝影不棄不離，回憶被象徵性地維繫家庭生活那岌岌可危的延續性和逐漸消失的近親遠房。照片，這些幽影般的痕跡，象徵性地提供了散離的親人的存在。一個家庭的相冊，一般來說都是關於那個大家族的——而且，那個大家族僅剩的，往往也就是這麼一本相冊。
由於照片使人們假想擁有一個並非真實的過去，因此照片也幫助人們擁有他們在其中感到不安的空間。是以，攝影與一種最典型的現代活動——旅遊——並肩發展。
(p.035)

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photo­graphs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photo­graph, and move on.
拍照是核實經驗的一種方式，也是拒絕經驗的一種方式——也即僅僅把經驗局限於尋找適合拍攝的對象，把經驗轉化為一個影像、一個紀念品。旅行變成累積照片的一種戰略。拍照這一活動本身足以帶來安慰，況且一般可能會因旅行而加深的那種迷失感，也會得到緩解。大多數遊客都感到有必要把相機擱在他們與他們遇到的任何矚目的東西之間。他們對其他反應沒有把握，於是拍一張照。這就確定了經驗的樣式：停下來，拍張照，然後繼續走。
(p.036)

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublima­tion of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situa­tion where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa.
拍攝人即是侵犯人，把他們視作他們從未把自己視作的樣子，了解他們對自己從不了解的事情：它把人變成可以被象徵性地擁有的物件。一如相機是槍枝的昇華，拍攝某人也是一種昇華式的謀殺——一種軟謀殺，正好適合一個悲哀、受驚的時代。
最終，人們可能學會多用相機而少用槍枝來發洩他們的侵略欲，代價是使世界更加影像氾濫。人們開始捨子彈而取膠捲的一個局面是，在東非，攝影狩獵正在取代槍枝狩獵。
(p.042~043)

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mod. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slic­ing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biologi­cal and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. The moody, intricately textured Paris of Atget and Brassai is mostly gone. Like the dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs exor­cises some of the anxiety and remorse prompted by their disappearance, so the photographs of neighborhoods now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past.
現在是懷舊的時代，而照片積極地推廣懷舊。拍攝是一門輓歌藝術，一門黃昏藝術。大多數被拍攝對象——僅僅憑著被拍攝——都滿含哀婉。一個醜陋或怪異的被拍攝物可能令人感動，因為它已由於攝影師的青睞而獲得尊嚴。一個美麗的被拍攝物可能成為疚愧感的對象，因為它已衰朽或不再存在。所有照片都「使人想到死」。拍照就是參與另一個人（或物） 的必死性、脆弱性、可變性。所有照片恰恰都是通過切下這一刻並把它凍結，來見證時間的無情流逝。
相機開始複製世界的時候，也正是人類的風景開始以令人眩暈的速度發生變化之際：當無數的生物生活形式和社會生活形式在極短的時間內逐漸被摧毀的時候，一種裝置應運而生，記錄正在消失的事物。尤金‧阿杰，和布拉賽鏡頭下那鬱鬱寡歡、紋理複雜的巴黎已幾乎消失。就像死去的親友保留在家庭相冊裡，他們在照片中的身影驅散他們的亡故給親友帶來的某些焦慮和悔恨一樣，現已被拆毀的街區和遭破壞並變得荒涼的農村地區的照片，也為我們提供了與過去的零星聯繫。
(p.043~044)

A new sense of the notion of information has been con­structed around the photographic image. The photograph is a thin slice of space as well as time. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders ("framing") seem arbi­trary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinu­ous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. (Conversely, anything can be made adja­cent to anything else.)
圍繞著攝影影像，已形成了一種關於信息概念的新意識。照片既是一片薄薄的空間，也是時間。在一個由攝影影像統治的世界，所有邊界 (「取景」) 似乎都是任意的。任何東西都可以與任何別的東西分開和脫離關係：只需以不同的取景來拍攝要拍攝的人物或景物就行了。(相反地，也可以使任何東西與別的東西扯在一起。）
(p.052~053)

The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness. The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience en­hanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world—all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photo­graphs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that every­thing in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
攝影對世界的認識之局限，在於儘管它能夠激起良心，但它最終絕不可能成為倫理認識或政治認識。通過靜止照片而獲得的認識，將永遠是某種濫情，不管是犬儒的還是人道主義的濫情。它將是一種折價的認識——貌似認識，貌似智慧：如同拍照貌似占有，貌似強姦。正是照片中被假設為的可理解的東西的那種啞默，構成相片的吸引力和挑釁性。照片之無所不在，對我們的倫理感受力有著無可估量的影響。攝影通過以一個複製的影像世界來裝飾這個已經擁擠不堪的世界，使我們覺得世界比它實際上的樣子更容易為我們所理解。
需要由照片來確認現實和強化經驗，這乃是一種美學消費主義，大家都樂此不疲。工業社會使其公民患上影像癮；這是最難以抗拒的精神污染形式。強烈渴求美，強烈渴求終止對表面以下的探索，強烈渴求救贖和讚美世界的肉身——所有這些情欲感覺都在我們從照片獲得的快感中得到確認。但是，其他不那麼放得開的感情也得到表達。如果形容說，人們患上了攝影強迫症，大概是不會錯的：把經驗本身變成一種觀看方式。最終，擁有一次經驗等同於給這次經驗拍攝一張照片，參與一次公共事件則愈來愈等同於通過照片觀看它。十九世紀最有邏輯的唯美主義者馬拉美說，世界上的一切事物的存在，都是為了在一本書裡終結。今天，一切事物的存在，都是為了在一張照片中終結。
(p.054~055)