有预料到的是近半个世纪以来摄影技术的飞速发展。与人人都能使用的袖珍轻便的数码相机的时代相比，拍照时必须扛着一个笨重、昂贵的新鲜玩意儿的那个时代简直太遥远了。在当时照相机是聪明人、有钱人沉醉其中的贵重玩具。十九世纪三十年代末英国和法国制造的第一批相机，只能由发明者本人和摄影迷来操作。那时根本没有职业摄影者，因此也就无所谓业余摄影者。在这最初的十年中，摄影并没有明确的社会功用，它是一种没有报酬的艺术性活动，尽管当时摄影尚未成为一门艺术。但与本雅明的论断相反，恰恰是摄影的“工业化”使它成为艺术。“工业化”使摄影者的活动产生了社会实效，反对这些实效的力量激发并增强了摄影者把摄影作为一门艺术而进行的个性化实验中的自觉意识和审美力。
What could be anticipated was the rapid development of photographic technology over the past half century. Compared with today’s era of compact, lightweight digital cameras accessible to everyone, the time when one had to shoulder a bulky, expensive, and novel device to take a photograph now seems unimaginably distant. In those early days, the camera was a costly toy enjoyed by the clever and the wealthy. The first cameras manufactured in Britain and France in the late 1830s could be operated only by their inventors themselves or by devoted enthusiasts. There were no professional photographers then, and consequently no amateurs either. During this initial decade, photography had no clearly defined social function. It was an unpaid activity of an artistic nature, even though photography had not yet been recognized as an art form. Yet, contrary to Walter Benjamin’s assertion, it was precisely the “industrialization” of photography that enabled it to become art. Industrialization endowed photographic practice with social efficacy, and the forces that resisted these effects in turn stimulated and strengthened photographers’ self-awareness and aesthetic sensibility in conducting individualized experiments that treated photography as an art form.
Leaving the Stage – Where Came from, Where to Go
闲置废弃的蒸汽机机车，炼钢厂令人生畏的巨大无比的车间、高炉和烟囱，如巨龙一般向远方不断延伸的铁轨，还有在新的造城运动中被夷为平地的工业废墟和老旧房屋……，等等这些并非自然的而是人类自己制造的“工业景观”或“工业风景”，正是傅文俊在他的作品中不断重复的主题和对象。他在影像中叙述的那些关于城市的故事并非一种简单的未来主义者的乐观憧憬，相反，刻意做旧的技术处理和对破败之物的选择，还有晦暗压抑的色调，都使他的作品染上了一种挥之不去的、伤感的怀旧的挽歌情调，仿佛城市的落日与黄昏。
Idle and abandoned steam locomotives; the awe-inspiring, colossal workshops, blast furnaces, and chimneys of steel plants; railway tracks stretching endlessly into the distance like giant dragons; and the industrial ruins and old houses razed to the ground in waves of new urban construction—these are not natural landscapes, but “industrial landscapes” or “industrial scenery” created by human hands. They are precisely the themes and subjects that Fu Wenjun repeatedly returns to in his work. The stories of the city that he narrates through images are not simple futurist visions filled with optimism. On the contrary, his deliberate use of aged visual treatments, his choice of dilapidated objects, and his dark, oppressive tonalities all infuse the works with an inescapable sense of melancholy and nostalgic elegy—like the setting sun and twilight of the city.
Leaving the Stage – Reclusion
其实这种叫做“工业景观”或“工业风景”的东西，早在一百多年前就出现在印象主义、未来主义、超现实主义和达达派艺术家们作品中了。在莫奈（Claude Monet）、毕沙罗（Camille Pissarro）、布勒东（André Breton）、波菊尼（Umberto Boccioni）、杜尚（Marcel Duchamp）等艺术家的笔下，工业及其城市文明的景观不但构成了他们一些重要作品的母题，而且也是其创作灵感的巨大源泉。有人曾说，毕卡索（Pablo Picasso）与布拉克（Georges Braque）创立立体主义的动机来自于对田园牧歌消逝后机器文明时代的恐惧和预感，那比他们更早一些的塞尚(Paul Cézanne)呢？他年复一年地躲在法国南方的普罗旺斯，用一种解析的、理性的、科学的方法画他家乡埃克斯的山坡。在西方现代主义的血统中，孕育出工业文明与城市文明的科学理性精神，一直都在发挥着推波助澜的作用。塞尚教导我们学会把自然看成立方体和圆柱形，这正是一种基于科学立场之上的观看方法：在眼见的自然和想到的自然之间，后者在新兴的城市文明所代表的世界观中已获得了支配性的地位。这也正是古典世界与现代文明之间的重要分野。
In fact, what is known as “industrial landscapes” or “industrial scenery” had already appeared more than a century ago in the works of Impressionist, Futurist, Surrealist, and Dada artists. In the writings and images of artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, André Breton, Umberto Boccioni, and Marcel Duchamp, the landscapes of industry and urban civilization not only constituted key motifs in some of their most important works, but also served as a vast source of creative inspiration. It has been said that the motivation behind Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s founding of Cubism stemmed from a sense of fear and premonition toward the age of machine civilization that followed the disappearance of the pastoral idyll. What, then, of Paul Cézanne, who preceded them by a generation? Year after year, he withdrew to Provence in southern France, painting the hillsides of his hometown, Aix, through an analytical, rational, and scientific method. Within the lineage of Western modernism, the spirit of scientific rationality that gave rise to industrial and urban civilization has continually played a catalytic role. Cézanne taught us to learn to see nature as composed of cubes and cylinders—an approach to vision grounded in a scientific standpoint. Between the nature we see with our eyes and the nature we conceive in our minds, it is the latter that has assumed a dominant position within the worldview represented by emerging urban civilization. This, precisely, marks one of the fundamental divides between the classical world and modern civilization.
关于作者：管郁达，艺术批评家、策展人。
About the author: Guan Yuda is an art critic and curator.