摄影是什么？

Our visual world

我们的视觉世界



“Visual” means relating to sight or something you see. “Visual” also means a thing that is made to be seen. The text that makes up the words in this sentence is a visual. Diagrams, graphics, and illustrations are also visuals.

“视觉”意味着与视觉或你看到的东西有关。“视觉的”也意味着可以看到的东西。这句话中的单词是视觉上的。图表、图形和插图也是视觉效果。

Konstantinos Tsakalidis, for Bloomberg News

Pictures are our best-known visuals. Pictures are representations made by various techniques, such as drawing, painting, photography, and digital technologies. Pictures can have different purposes. They can be made to convey information, they can be made to incite action, and they can be aesthetic objects. Or they can be all those things at the same time.

图片是我们最著名的视觉效果。图片是由诸如绘画、绘画、摄影、数字技术等多种技术制作而成。图片可以有不同的用途，传达信息，引起行动，成为审美对象，或者他们可以同时是所有这些东西。

We have always lived in a visual world. From the beginning of the Stone Age 2.5 million years ago, humans have made art from shell, stone, and paint. Cave paintings were first made more than 40,000 years ago. What has changed throughout history are the techniques used to make pictures.

我们一直生活在视觉世界中。从一开始250万年前的石器时代，人类就开始用贝壳、石头、涂料制作艺术品。洞穴壁画产生于40,000多年前。纵观历史，发生变化的只是用于绘画的技术。

World Press Photo in our visual world

我们视觉世界中的世界新闻照片

While we have always lived in a visual world, recent technological transformations have given visuals an even more important role in communications today. Billions and trillions of pictures are taken and shared by people all over the world. Most of them are personal images shared on private accounts. Some capture news moments, and like previous photographs taken by citizens, they can be widely used and are very important.

虽然我们一直生活在一个视觉世界中，但最近的技术转变在当今社会赋予视觉更重要的角色，数十亿和数万亿张照片被拍摄并被全世界人民所共享。其中大部分是从私人帐户上共享的个人图像。一些捕捉了新闻的时刻，像以前市民拍摄的照片一样，它们可以广泛地被使用并且非常重要。

Vladimir Encina

For professional visual journalists, navigating the world where non-professional photography is increasingly used by news outlets to illustrate world news can be challenging. Moreover, many photojournalists are under threat, their work regularly censored. Not only the options, but also the consequences of publication for an individual photographer can be very different from region to region.

因新闻媒体越来越多地使用非专业的摄影来展示新闻，专业的视觉记者遇到了难题，此外，许多摄影记者受到威胁，他们的工作经常受到审查。不同地区的摄影师不仅有不同的选择，而且发表作品的结果也不尽相同。

Nonetheless, a wide arena of photographers, both non-professional and professional is necessary for the maintenance of press freedom and freedom of speech. The more visual, reliable sources we have, the better.

尽管如此，为维护新闻自由和言论自由，需要大量的非专业和专业摄影师。拥有更多直观、更可靠的来源，更好。

However, the visual economy is also dominated by citizen’s pictures and stock images for general use, and the revenue to pay for professional work is not easy to come by. The proliferation of imagery shows people appreciate how visuals communicate. Professionals have the creative ability, technical skills, and storytelling knowledge to make visuals that can communicate in the most compelling, engaging, and powerful ways, knowing there is potentially a large audience. All of us can operate cameras, especially the one in our smartphone, but only a very few of us can be photojournalists or documentary photographers of the highest quality.

然而，视觉经济也以市民图片和库存图片为主，专业工作的收入来之不易。图像的扩散表明人们欣赏视觉传达的方式。专业人士拥有创造能力、技术技能和讲故事的知识，可以制作能够以最引人注目、最引人入胜和最强大的方式进行交流的视觉效果，因为他们知道有大量的潜在观众。我们所有人都可以操作相机，尤其是我们的智能手机，但我们中只有极少数人可以成为最高质量的摄影记者或纪实摄影师。

What is photography?

Photography is a technique for making durable pictures by recording light. “Photography” comes from the Greek words “phos” (meaning light) and“graphê” (meaning drawing). From 1800 on various inventors tried more than a dozen ways of recording light on sheets of paper or metal treated with chemicals.

摄影是以记录光来制作耐用照片的一种技术。“摄影”来自希腊词“phos”（意为光）和“graphê”（意为绘画）。从 1800 年开始，各种发明家尝试了十几种在经过化学处理的纸张或金属上记录光的方法。

Daguerreotype portrait of Walt Whitman, New York Public Library

The oldest surviving photograph was made by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. His colleague Louis Daguerre made pictures on a sheet of copper coated with a thin layer of silver. Photography is said to have been invented in 1839 when the “daguerreotype” was introduced. The first book illustrated with photographs was The Pencil of Nature, published in1844-1846, by the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, using pictures made with salted paper prints from his calotype negatives. Each of these early techniques used a camera that was large, heavy, and difficult to move. They made a single image on a sheet of paper or metal which could not be copied.

现存最古老的照片是由法国发明家Joseph Nicéphore Niépce制作的，摄于 1826 年或 1827 年。他的同事路易斯·达盖尔在涂有一层薄银的铜上制作照片。据说摄影发明于1839 年，“银版照相法”问世时。第一本以照片作为插图的书《The Pencil of Nature》，出版于1844-1846 年，作者是英国发明家William Henry Fox Talbot，他用盐渍纸从 calotype底片中打印照片。这些早期的照相机很大、重且难以移动。他们在一张纸或金属上制作不可复制的单幅图像。

Oldest surviving photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Photography was the basis for the moving images that later developed into cinematography. In the 1870s Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer living in California, used multiple cameras to capture the movement of animals. He then projected these still images in rapid sequence to show horses galloping, creating the first motion picture.

摄影是后来发展为电影摄影的动态影像的基础。在 1870 年代，Eadweard Muybridge，英国人，住在加州的摄影师，使用多个摄像头捕捉动物的运动。然后，他把静止的图像快速的按顺序投影出来，显示马在奔跑，创造了第一个动态图像。

Photography became popular when the American George Eastman developed celluloid film and sold his first “Kodak” camera in 1888. The Eastman Kodak company introduced the box-shaped “Brownie” camera in 1900. It was easily portable, and its low price and ease of use made photography something everyone could do. These cameras used rolls of film that made negatives from which paper prints were then produced.

摄影在美国人George Eastman开发出胶卷并在1888年出售他的第一台“柯达”相机后开始流行。柯达公司于1900年推出了盒子形状的“Brownie”相机，便于携带，价格低廉和使用方便，使摄影成为每个人能做的事情。这些相机以胶卷制作底片，然后打印出纸质照片。

George Eastman's first “Kodak” camera

Because photography, both still and moving, began as a mechanical process based on scientific techniques, it has long been regarded as “objective”. To be “objective” means not to be influenced by personal beliefs, feelings, or perspectives. When Talbot called his book The Pencil of Nature, he believed that photography is an instrument for recording the natural world without human intervention.

因为摄影，无论是静止的还是动态的，都是从机械开始的以科学技术为基础的工艺，长期以来一直被认为是“客观的”。“客观”意味着不受个人信念、感觉或观点的影响。当塔尔博特把他的书叫做 《The Pencil of Nature》时，他认为摄影是一种记录没有人为干预的自然世界的工具。

Understanding photography as “objective” has been a misleading assumption from the beginning. Photographs are personal interpretations of the world: from the techniques used for recording light, to the selection of a time and location, and the framing of a specific subject or situation. Photography is therefore always a deliberate construction and a medium of representation, done subjectively and open to subjects’ interpretation.

将摄影理解为“客观”是一种从一开始就使人误导的假设。照片是个人对世界的解释：从用于记录光的技术，到对时间和地点的选择，以及特定主题或情形的框架。因此，摄影始终是一种深思熟虑的构建和表现媒介，是主观的，并开放给主体的解释。

Photographs portray a multi-dimensional world on a two-dimensional flat surface, even if they show motion. Photographs do not have a fixed meaning and are subject to the viewers’ interpretation and reading, which is influenced by the viewers’ history, education, state of mind and many more factors.

照片在二维平面描绘了一个多维的世界，即使它们表现的是运动。照片没有固定的意义并受制于观众的解释和阅读，受观众的历史、教育、心态和更多的因素的影响。

Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. The photograph was awarded World Press Photo of the Year in 1957. Douglas Martin, The Charlotte News/Associated Press.

Photographs were also taken and used for different purposes, and with various effects. It has, for example, been a tool of colonial power through ethnographic pictures classifying racial divisions, and it has also been an instrument of anti-colonial resistance by making injustice and violence visible.

照片因不同的目的被拍摄和使用，产生了各种效果。例如，它一直是殖民权力的工具，通过民族图片的分类划分种族，它还通过曝光不公正和暴力成为反殖民的工具。

Developed by people, representing people and places, and serving the interests of people and states, photography has never been purely “objective”. This sense has only grown stronger with the changes to photography in the last century.

由人发明，代表人和地方，服务于人民和国家的利益，摄影从来就不是纯粹“客观的”。这种感觉仅仅在上世纪伴随摄影的变化变得更加强烈。

以上内容节选自World Press Photo 《See the Story》