视觉陷阱:欺骗双眼的艺术
The most enduring images break their immediate frames of reference and climb into our imaginations. Such is the power of a photograph captured this week of a soldier in the Free Syrian Army standing guard as the first major ceasefire in five years came into effect.
最具生命力的画作都能打破周围的框架,让我们浮想联翩。这正是本周的一张照片所达到的神奇效果。照片拍摄的是一名叙利亚自由军战士巡逻的情景,而彼时正值该国5年来的首个重大停火协议生效之际。
2016年2月26日,一名叙利亚自由军战士在叙利亚东古塔地区巡逻
The picture relies for its intensity on an illusion of three-dimensionality that makes us believe that the patrolling figure is on the verge of stepping through the lens of the camera into our very minds. The subtle sleight of eye is comparable to an optical trick played in the 19th Century by a Catalan illustrator, whose subject – like the rebel soldier in this week’s image – seems forever poised on a threshold between this world and another.
这张照片依靠强烈的三维错觉让我们感觉里面的士兵即将穿越相机镜头,造成强烈的心灵冲击。这种巧妙的障眼法与19世纪的一位加泰罗尼亚画家使用的视觉欺骗方法非常相似,与本周这张照片里的反对派士兵一样,后者作品的主人公似乎也永远定格在了两个世界的边界上。
Among the challenges every photojournalist faces is how to bridge the geographic and cultural divides that separate his or her subject from an audience half a world away – an audience over whom a tidal wave of competing visual messages crashes every day.
由于作品的主题与远隔万里的受众之间存在着地理和文化方面的隔阂,而这些受众每天都要接收相互竞争的海量信息,所以,如何消除这种隔阂便成为了所有摄影记者都要面对的挑战。
The perspective adopted by Ammar El Bushy, the photographer who took this photo of the anti-Assad guard, takes advantage of a perfectly positioned notch in the entrance-way of the tunnel through which the crouching figure is seen advancing towards the camera.
在这张照片里,一名反阿萨德武装人员正在一步一步接近相机的位置。而作为摄影师的阿玛尔·艾玛·布希(Ammar El Bushy)则采用了独特的视角,充分利用了地道入口处的一个缺口来呈现跳出框架的效果。
That notch in the rubbled wall of a bombed-out structure is curved around the shape of the soldier’s head, creating the unsettling illusion that the armed rebel is at once behind and in front of the aperture to the tunnel. The result is a photo that breaks down the barrier between the stresses of a conflict raging in an inconceivable elsewhere and the retinas of distant readers.
照片上的小缺口位于一栋被炸弹袭击过的建筑物墙壁上,从视觉效果上看,恰好卡在士兵的头部周围,形成了一种令人不安的错觉,就好像这个全副武装的反对派会立刻从外面闯进来。通过这种手法,这张照片就打破了时空的界限,让远隔万里的读者也可以通过双眼体会到另一个充满冲突的地方所弥漫的紧张氛围。
2015年5月23日,作为欧洲迪士尼活动的一部分,德国街头画家埃德加·穆勒(Edgar Mueller)在巴黎市政厅前绘制错觉画。
The photograph’s ability to overcome visual boundaries places it in a tradition of aesthetic trickery that dates back to ancient Greece and a technique now known by the French phrase trompe-l'œil (or ‘deceive the eye’). El Bushy’s image recalls, in particular, the optical dexterity of a work by a pioneering 19th-Century Realist painter from the Catalan town of Puigcerdà.
这种突破传统视觉界限的方法最早可以追溯到古希腊,现在还诞生了一个专门的法语名词:trompe-l'œil,意思是“视觉陷阱”。艾玛·布希的照片让人想起19世纪的加泰罗尼亚普奇塞达镇(Puigcerdà)的一位现实主义先锋画家。
Pere Borrell del Caso’s most famous work, Escaping Criticism (1874), depicts a boy in mid-clamber, as if burgling his way through the painting’s frame – his eyes wide in wonder with his first glimpse of the real world. Seen in the context of this week’s war-weary photograph, Borrell’s enchanting canvas interjects a note of hopeless hope, that the ceasefire into which the rebel tentatively steps is more than a cruel illusion.
这位画家名叫皮埃尔·伯瑞尔·德·卡索(Pere Borrell del Caso),他最著名的作品是《逃脱批评》(Escaping Criticism),创作于1874年。这幅画描绘了一个正在攀爬的男孩儿,从画作效果来看,他似乎即将从画框里爬出来一样——他第一次见到真实的世界,所以好奇地睁大了双眼,仔细打量着周遭的一切。伯瑞尔的画作让人产生了绝望中的希望,而从本周这张反战主题的照片来看,反对派尝试性地达成的这次停火协议,似乎也不仅仅是一种残酷的错觉。