相关阅读：
第三届连州国际摄影年展学术委员会
Third Lianzhou International Photo Festival
连 州 国 际 摄 影 年 展 组 委 会
影子的炼金术
第三届连州国际摄影年展
学术计划书
学术主题
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影子的炼金术” “影”，古字作“景”，日也，明也，照也，竟也。由日照而转化为影，其中蕴含着中国古代哲学的虚实化生之道。而西语中的“影子”则通常与虚假、忧郁、幽灵、非实在性等负面事物相关。“炼金术”是欧洲中世纪的一种化学哲学的思想和实践，也是当代化学的雏形。今天，炼金术被泛指为由平凡中创造出奇迹的神奇能力。“影子的炼金术”一方面把我们重新引向1830年代，摄影术发明之初，图像在化学药剂的作用下显影并被留存之际所引发的创始性的惊奇，在影像形成的刹那，时空凝聚，世界成形显象——在今天，在这个图像增殖且泛滥的时代，这种源始性的惊奇早已沦丧。另一方面，这个主题也喻指了艺术家摄影创作的天赋和能力。这是一种把握时机与气象的能力，化凡庸为神奇的能力，在刹那中穿越时间的能力，为世界造像的能力。在当代艺术家的摄影实践中，这种能力被进一步转化为一种用光与影创造可能世界的实验的冲动。
摄影是世界绵延中的一个事件，而非空无的一瞬；它不是决定性瞬间的凝驻，因为它并不是要向我们展示出线性时间的切片，它的意义也不止于连接时间轴的上下时刻。照片是时间的容器，它包容并隐匿其中的，是不经意的一瞬，是日常生活中失落的刹那。摄影将寸寸光阴封存起来，在显影中复现，诉诸永久——从刹那到永恒，这戏剧性的转换，使人们忽略了照相机记忆/感光/显影的延时性——那是影像与现实这两个平行世界间的分延（differànce）。在此延迟中，有一段光阴不为人知地被封存在摄影的世界里。
摄影是发生在时间中的一个事件，也是发生在我们这个世界中的秘密世界。摄影渴望重新获得它的源初命名——光之书写，重新召唤出它内在的时间性，在摄影内在的时间性中，光之书写和相机之记忆共同成就了“时间剧场”中的一幕影子的戏剧。在这场剧目中，光之遗迹造就了影子的奇观，时间的形状在此为我们所见。这一切，都应该归功于影子的炼金术。
学术话语
“一般的辩论都局限于有关‘作为艺术的摄影’(Photegrahphie als Kunst)的美学争论，而像‘作为摄影的艺术’(Kunst als Photographie)这样更具社会意义的论题却罕受人关注”。本雅明的这一论断在艺术界和摄影界一直未得到有力的回应。的确，我们与摄影的关系一言难尽。在我们惯常的经验中，摄影是现实的替代物，或者说，一种替代性现实，它帮助我们获得知识，控制现实，它是伟大事件的记录，同时又作为日常生活的纪念，它是现代人的集体制像行为，同时也是一种社会仪式。它见证和塑造着家族的历史，个人的和公共的记忆。无论如何，摄影从一开始就远远超出了艺术的意义范畴。本届连州国际摄影年展将致力于探讨摄影的超美学意义，聚焦于“摄影作为经验”这一话题。它所探讨的摄影，并不只是作为艺术类型或者媒介类型的摄影，也不只是摄影艺术或者艺术摄影，而意在讨论摄影作为一种视觉-成像机制给我们的现实经验带来了怎样的改变？于是，摄影经验突显出的就是我们依之而生的摄影（Photography we live by），摄影的日常表达与意识形态，摄影的生存论和人类学内涵。
展览结构
I主题展：时间剧场
摄影是对事件与时刻的命名，我们对事件、情境的感觉已经与照相机的干预联系了起来。然而，摄影本身是个事件。在我们的经验中，摄影的事件性和时间性却已经被“瞬间”的经验抽空了。
今天，所有民族都在分享着同一种时间观。一方面，时间被化约为一个抽象、纯粹的数字序列，时间原本所牵连着的生活世界的意义被剔除了，天时与人事之间那种紧密的相契相连的关系日渐消隐。另一方面，数字时间轴的线性想象与片段之连续的观念结合在一起。根据这种观念，时间是无数个连续的瞬间切片。
20世纪初快照的出现仿佛为这种观念提供了直观的证据，作为“扑击”的快照将摄影的注意力引向对于“决定性瞬间”的捕捉，时间似乎被切割成了一系列瞬间的切片，而摄影就是这些切片、这些瞬间的肖像，摄影事件使瞬间变得可见，把刹那带入我们的经验。同时，这些瞬间也逐步掩盖了摄影作为“时基媒体”的意义。
主题展“时间剧场”是对于摄影时间性与事件性的反复强调，是对摄影内在时光的重新确认。按照主题需要，主题展由以下两部分构成：
1．光之剧场：本单元旨在全面开发夜间摄影的可能性，光的书写轨迹在相机记忆的延迟中显影成形，那是因光的书写和相机的记忆而成就的一幕独特的摄影戏剧。在这里，黑暗是时间的容器，光与影的剧场。
2．摄影叙事：摄影家如何拓展摄影的叙事容量？摄影叙事如何应对运动影像和DV时代的挑战？摄影拼贴中混合的此刻，混乱的时间现场……从大卫•霍克尼到Jeff wall的最近期的作品中，摄影叙事发生了怎样的变化？
II文献展：摄影作为经验
本单元将力图从文化研究的角度，重新检视摄影对人类经验的塑造作用，以记录/记忆、摄影/造像、留影/存念、显影/定影、历史/神话等不同版块，共同构造起一个跨学科的讨论平台，展现摄影的生存论和人类学意蕴。本单元将邀请国内外知名文化研究学者和摄影家，共同探讨摄影的历史与政治，摄影作为日常体验对人类经验史的意义。
III实验展: 元摄影
摄影作为当代艺术实践的重要媒介，半个世纪以来已经形成了丰富的视觉积累，近年来，观念性摄影更成为国际艺坛的关注焦点。摄影在当代艺术实验中的意义早已超越了摄影的惯常范畴，摄影作为一个可复制的视觉－意义场域，已经被转化成为平面性的观念“发生－展示”的现场。实验展单元将选择10位当代艺术家的摄影作品，从不同角度建立个案，展示摄影在当代艺术中的可能性。实验展涵盖摄影、装置、绘画、多媒体表演等多种当代艺术形式，是以摄影为媒介和借口的当代艺术实验，是对“摄影之后的摄影”的富有想象力的探索和展示。
IV开放展：摄影部落
本单元将呈现国内外60余位知名摄影家、艺术家的视觉个案，旨在展示国际摄影领域的最新探索和成就，强调当代摄影创作多元、生动的面貌。参与本单元的艺术家将由国内外重要的学术机构提名，策展团队评议审核，众多个体共同构成一个摄影部落。
The Alchemy of Shadows
Lianzhou International Photo Festival (LIPF) 2007
Academic Theme
The Alchemy of Shadows
The ancient Chinese character for ‘shadow’ contains the ideogram for ‘day’ and within its graphic transformation of the light of day into dark shadows one can see a miniature illustration of the birth of and interconnectedness between the ancient Chinese philosophical concepts of substance and vacuity, being and nothingness. In Western languages, the term ‘shadow’ often refers to the unreal, the supernatural, gloom and other negative things. The term alchemy, the medieval school of philosophical and experimental inquiry into the nature of things and forerunner of modern chemistry, is commonly used today in reference to a process through which thing are turned beyond the ordinary. The Alchemy of Shadows will take us back to the 1830s, to the birth of photography when photographers first used chemicals to develop and preserve images for the renewed amazement of the viewer. In an image-saturated era such as ours, the sense of pure bewilderment before an image, an entire world produced out of the flash convergence of space and time, has been lost.
The Alchemy of Shadows will also evoke the genius and talent required by art photography: the mastery of time and atmosphere, the ability to turn the ordinary into the miraculous, a gift for transcending time and space in the blink of an eye, and the expertise to sculpt the likeliness of a world. In the lens of the contemporary photographer, this talent takes the form of an impulse to create ever more possible worlds out of the nuances of light and shadow.
Photography is an event in the continuity of the world, not a meaningless moment of nothing. It is not the solidification of decisive moments because it does not intend to present to us a segment of linear time. Nor is its meaning limited to being a connector between consecutive moments along the time axis. Photography is a container of time. What it contains and conceals is a lost moment of life. Photography seals moments of time, and fixes them in images in order to make them permanent – from a moment to permanence. Because of this dramatic transformation, people ignore the continuity of time in the course of recording, exposing and presenting images. This is a delay between the parallel worlds of image and reality, in which the passage of time is forgotten.
Photography takes place within the duration of time, and occurs in the mysterious realms of our time-based world as well. As an attempt to live up literally to its name, i.e. ‘writing with light’, and with the help of photographic memory, photography strives to stage a ‘play of shadows’, a spectacle of silhouettes begot of light, in the theater of time, revealing the shape of time for all to see. That is the magic of The Alchemy of Shadows.
Academic Debate
Photography as Experience
‘The debate rests mostly in the esthetic disagreement of photography as a form of art, whereas the sociological notion of the photographic art receives little attention.’ Both worlds, artistic and photographic, have given Benjamin’s argument enough thought to form a convincing response. Of course, our relationship to photography cannot be summarized in one sentence. In our ordinary experience, photography is a replacement of reality, a reality that is replaced. It helps us retrieve knowledge and controls our perception of reality; it documents major events and serves as a memento of daily life; it is a collective form of image-making behavior and is a part of social ritual. It is a witness of family histories, a mold for individual and collective memories, and a building block of the iconography of history.
Since the day of its invention, photography has spilled beyond the boundaries of the definition of art. LIPF 2007 will examine the significance of photography beyond the aesthetic, focusing on ‘photography as experience’. Photography will not be considered merely as the art of photography, nor will it be analyzed as a form of fine art or an artistic medium. We will explore how photography alters our experience of reality as a visual-perceptual mechanism. Therefore, the experience of photography will strikingly demonstrate the concept of ‘photography we live by’, with focus on the photography as the expression of the quotidian, the ideology behind photography, existentialism in photography and its anthropological implications.
Exhibition Structure
1. Thematic Exhibition: Theater of Time
Photography consecrates the moment, and our perceptions of events and situations are bound to those of the camera. However, photography is an event in itself and our experience of the moment obscures the event of photography and its internal temporality.
Today, people of different cultures share the same concept of time. On one hand, time is simplified to an abstract yet absolute digital sequence. The meaning of life used to be encompassed by time but this approach has now disappeared, and the intimate connection between time and human beings is slowly fading away. On the other hand, the linearity of time intertwines with the concept of continuous moments, which states that time is a segment of numerous continuous moments.
The appearance of the instant photo seems to provide direct evidence of such a concept. An instant photo snaps an image, and thus focuses attention on capturing a “decisive moment”, a slice out of a series of moments. Thus photography becomes a splice, a portrait of a moment in time, the act of photography rendering the moment visible and bringing the instant in the breadth of our existence. At the same time, these moments conceal the meaning of photography as a time-based medium.
The Theater of Time will alternately emphasize the internal time of photography and its nature as an event in the world. Additionally, it will reaffirm the inherent time-space and narrative potential of photography.
2. Documentary Exhibition: Photography as Experience
This segment will adopt a cultural study approach to observe how photography molds human experience. Starting from a series of conceptual binary units such as record/memory, photography/image-making, souvenir/memories, develop/fix and history/legend, the documentary show will encourage cross-disciplinary discussion of existentialism in photography and its anthropological implications. The panel will invite renowned photographers and researchers of culture from China and abroad to debate the history and politics of photography, and explore the significance of the pervasiveness of the photographic experience to the history of the human experience as a whole.
3. Experimental Exhibitions: Metaphotography
Photography is an important medium in contemporary art. In the past half century it has accumulated a rich visual legacy, becoming one of the focuses of international art scene in recent years. The role of ‘display’ of ‘what happened’ traditionally ascribed to the reproducible visual field of meaning that is photography is questioned by contemporary art. The experimental panel will select visual works that reveal the world of possibilities offered by contemporary art and will consist of photos, installations, paintings, multimedia performances and other contemporary art forms. It will showcase photography as a medium and a pretext of contemporary art, and explore and illustrate the fantastic notion of metaphotography, ‘photography beyond photography’.
4. Open space: Invitational Solo Shows
This segment will display the visual works of 60 renowned Chinese and foreign photographers and artists. It aims to exhibit the most recent explorations and achievements of the international photography scene while emphasizing the vitality and variety of contemporary photographic creation. Exhibiting artists will be recognized by prominent academic institutions and hand-picked by the curatorial team.
http://www.lipf.cn/07/index.php
