最像畢加索的戰地攝影師？出入恐怖之地的藝術家？

唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin），出生於1935年10月9日，是英國如今仍然在世的最偉大的攝影師之一，也是攝影簡史上的主要人物之一。

唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin）

納粹對當時倫敦芬斯伯里公園貧民區的轟炸所致的貧困和剝削，給麥卡林的童年留下了濃重的陰霾。二戰期間，他最開始撤退到索摩賽特郡——英格蘭西部以優美的田園風光著稱的地區（也是麥卡林現居之地），而後則去往北方的阿蘭卡希爾。但這兩段時光都沒有在他的自傳中《不合理的行為》作為愉悅的回憶被提及。他一生中所拍攝的圖像描繪了與他早年熟悉的環境相似的風景畫卷與人間疾苦。

年輕時的唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin）

如今麥卡林已經83歲高齡了，作為英國最具話語權的泰特不列顛美術館正在展出他的個人攝影回顧展。在新聞發布會上的略略一眼，他給我留下的印象竟與我生平所讀的對畢加索的描述驚人地相似——矮小健壯但身形出色，身姿挺拔，看起來十分機警。

唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin）

最令人驚嘆的是，他顯得異常年輕。作為諸多駭人聽聞的苦楚的見證者，麥卡林面對歲月的獨特態度，顯得難能可貴。如果要使得身體上經歷如此堅韌的洗禮，是一個人為了度過戰爭的艱難時刻而必須要承受的事情，必須所具備的能力，也許麥卡林這樣的特質就不會令我們這麼驚訝了。但他所做的還有客觀記錄下真實的戰爭與主觀感受，而這還需要的是敏銳的直覺和洞察力，以及深切的共情能力。簡單地說，你要是覺得麥克林應是泯然眾人矣，也太過離譜了。

芬斯伯里公園咖啡店，1958

這次回顧展橫跨了麥卡林的整個攝影生涯：從他1958年最初在兒時家鄉拍攝的一部分相片到最近2018年在敘利亞的霍姆斯城所攝作品。

芬斯伯里公園，僱主們（本地幫派），1958（麥卡林發表的處女作，發現者沖印）

單是上個世紀六十年代，他就用相機記錄下了柏林牆的築起，塞普勒斯土地上的希土之爭，中情局資助的僱傭兵消滅剛果盧蒙巴的殘留的士兵屍體，奈及利亞內戰與隨之帶給比夫拉人的饑荒之災，以及在越南戰爭中，他投向美國從北越南軍對順化的重奪之戰的獨特視角。

塞普勒斯，1964

剛果，1964

在這個時間節點，麥卡林在對於災難的記錄中做了一個短暫的喘息——他轉向了倫敦與不列顛群島。他開始為倫敦東區的無家可歸者拍攝照片，這些作品既令人稱奇又鮮活感人。

白化病男孩，比夫拉，1969

被炮彈震嚇的美國大兵，越南，順化，1968

接下來他又記錄了北愛爾蘭天主教徒與新教徒間的宗教衝突。這一時期後麥卡林在中東所攝的新聞影像固然傑出，但我個人看來，麥卡林已經在這個時期交出了他的最佳作品。

無家可歸的愛爾蘭人，斯皮塔菲爾德，倫敦

倫敦人，北愛爾蘭，1971

他在塞普勒斯、比夫拉，尤其是在越南拍攝的影像所引起的共鳴，已遠遠超出了它們記錄的特定主題——它們異常清晰地道出了世界瀰漫的恐怖氣息和戰爭的瘋狂。

塞普勒斯，1964

簡單來說，他在照片中展現的倫敦的窮途末路，描繪出我所知的最具衝擊力的相片。麥卡林這個時期的作品有一種極端的美感。我知道沒有人能比他更生動地描繪出人類靈魂中的陰暗面了。

在倫敦德里的伯格賽德，年輕的天主教徒正要襲擊英國士兵，1971

我曾與這次回顧展的一名策展人艾哈·梅雷斯談起麥卡林，其人，其作品與本次展覽。她最先告訴我這次泰特的展覽的重點：「麥卡林非常熱衷於讓人們了解他所從事的風景與靜物攝影。」和大多數嚴肅藝術家一樣，麥卡林的作品不能被簡單地歸結為某一類別——主題在他生命中的某一時刻誕生，而這種初生的興趣將在他之後的職業生涯中以更成熟的形式再次出現。儘管他七十年代在布拉德福德拍攝的作品獨特地聚焦在英國北部工業區，但這些與六十年代他拍攝的充滿張力的相片一脈相承。

西哈特爾普爾鋼鐵廠，達勒姆郡，1963

這些照片或許最適合被歸類為社會風貌影像。它們是具有紀錄意味的景觀，而麥卡林拍攝了多少人物的影像，那便有多少土地的影像。（麥卡林在這一領域的作品歸屬於健康攝影傳統的一部分，在英國也有比爾·布蘭德和克里斯·基利普的例子）有些許不同的是，麥卡林有一張非常美麗的麻雀亡於雪中的相片（1970年攝於赫特福德郡），完全缺失了紀錄意義，預示了之後他更為純粹的景觀與靜物作品。

死麻雀，赫特福德郡，1970 [與展覽中其他照片明顯不同的沖印照片-麻雀如此黑暗，看起來幾乎像剪

泰特回顧展的另一個重頭戲則是麥卡林的沖印作品。所有的展覽圖片都是麥卡林在他索摩賽特郡家中的暗房沖印的明膠銀鹽相片。梅雷斯說：「他本來可以做鉑金印相或其他本不需要自己沖印的相片展覽的。」「從策展上講，我們正試圖平衡他作為衝突攝影師的生活，以及他作為一名印刷大師的其他實踐領域。」梅雷斯告訴我，麥卡林已經「一次又一次，精鍊更精鍊」沖印了相同的相片，以期產生最能吸引人的情感的作品。儘管展出的一些照片是用彩色膠捲拍攝的（在某些情況下，在展覽中這些照片的形式為投影或是原始雜誌背景），所有的相片都是黑白的-麥卡林不是一個彩色攝影師。

查理檢查站附近，柏林，1961

麥卡林的沖印作品是十分傑出的。它們有著美妙的灰調層次和色調深度，並且根據相片細微的主題變化和大體上的繪畫技法選定大小比例進行印刷（麥卡林這些年來的風格絕大部分是非常一致的）。從審美上看，這些沖印出的許多相片的暗部和呈現出來的顆粒就像是它們被塗抹上了污垢。這全然不會降低麥卡林相片的清晰度，反而增強了相片的氛圍。從更專業的角度上講，沖洗出的相片的加光減光（印刷時手動改變圖像各個部分的曝光度來使圖像的局部區域變亮或變暗）都是十分精準的。

伊斯特本（英國英格蘭東南部港市）南部海岸的碼頭,1970

其他同麥卡林一樣熟練掌握沖印技術的佼佼者們會犯一個常見的錯誤：印刷機所致的色調變化是可以看得出來的；在這種情況下，這些變化幾乎是不可察覺的。作為一名沖印照片的技師，麥卡林與歐文·佩恩和安塞爾·亞當斯（兩位攝影界最偉大、最著名的沖印技師）不相上下。

靠近我房子的森林，1991

我對這場展覽唯一的保留意見有關於麥卡林的風景與靜物作品（尤其是後者）。雖然畫廊中到處點綴著令人稱奇的風景相片——它們與麥卡林的紀錄作品重疊，但是這場展覽的最後一個展廳卻為景觀和靜物照單獨保留。比起展覽上美麗的風景照，它們顯得過於稀少，特別是考慮到風光攝影自八十年代就在麥卡林的生活中佔據一席之地。

唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin）

一部最近出版的麥卡林的風景影集評價他是這一類型攝影作品的偉大攝影師之一，但他在泰特美術館展出的這一類作品並不能說明這一點。我也認為他更近的古遺風光照比他別的所有作品都略遜一籌。這些古迹風光照過於完美。以至於它們不具備麥卡林其他風光照中潛藏的張力（我猜測其中有部分原因是他在鏡頭上使用了紅色濾光片來塑造典型的黑暗天空，而不是通過在暗室減光來達成強調膠片的顆粒結構，使其呈現不那麼原始的效果）此外，在展覽中只有六張靜物相片，被塞在出口左邊的角落裡。雖然它們將光線運用得淋漓盡致，而且被精緻地被印刷展出，我仍覺得它們多少有些空洞。

攝影師愛德華·韋斯頓和歐文·佩恩之流為靜物攝影設置了一個相當高的門檻（正如麥卡林在衝突、紀實和風光類型相片中樹立的標準）——基於麥卡林在這一領域展示的相當有限的作品，這並不能讓我覺得他在此處自成一派。

唐·麥卡林（Don McCullin）

在與艾哈·梅雷斯的交談過程中，我詢問她是什麼樣的人會讓自己在如此危險的境地中，讓自己一再地與磨難交戰——簡而言之，唐·麥卡林究竟是什麼樣的人？她回答我說：「他異常平和，擁有讓人難以置信的溫柔善良和令人驚嘆的移情能力。即便他有讓人目瞪口呆的能力將自己至於絕境，即便他一旦到了那種境地，就不僅是在記錄發生的事情，而是在記錄人類的損耗……正是他這種龐大而真摯的努力，使得他能確保自己傳達了戰爭的徒勞。」

大南山上，一個牧師聽到士兵們的懺悔

我同意梅雷斯說的一切，但我認為這不能完全解釋他作品中的陰暗面，或者說，不能完全解釋他影像中的宗教感。英國著名小說家約翰·勒·卡爾（John le Carré）寫了一篇關於麥卡林的精彩引述，麥卡林本人選擇將其納入自傳；我相信這篇引述更全面地捕捉到了這位攝影師：

「他熟知各種形式的恐懼，他是這一方向的專家。他從上帝那兒歸來的，知道有多少不同邊緣。單是他在烏干達監獄的經歷就足以讓另一個人永遠擺脫困境——實質上正如我自己。他說他被沒收的次數超過了他記憶中的次數。但他並不是在吹噓什麼。談到死亡和風險，他似乎在相當有意地暗示：每一次測試他的運氣，他都在挑戰造物者的底線。生存即再獲寬恕和祝福。」

關於作者

麥克斯·巴斯托（Max Barstow）

麥克斯·巴斯托（Max Barstow）是一位常駐倫敦的攝影師。他對攝影的研究多是基於自學，當他還在劍橋大學國王學院學習哲學時，就已經開始了這方面的專業性工作。在一項重要的國際攝影比賽中，他的作品曾在英國國家肖像畫廊展出。Max不光一直創作著這些屢屢獲獎的照片，他還對攝影史和視覺藝術非常感興趣。總而言之，用他自己的話說就是：「我愛圖像。」

Don McCullin, born 9th October 1935, is one of Britain"s greatest living photographers, and one of the major figures in photography"s brief history. His childhood was overshadowed by poverty and the deprivations imposed by Nazi bombing raids in what was then a slum neighbourhood of London, Finsbury Park. During World War II, he was evacuated first to Somerset – a region of West England noted for its pastoral beauty (and McCullin"s present-day home) – then Lancashire in the North; neither of these stints away is recalled fondly in his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour. Images made throughout his life depict landscapes and hardship akin to settings he would have been intimately familiar with from his early years.

McCullin is now 83 and currently the subject of a London retrospective at one of the UK"s major galleries, Tate Britain. When I saw him briefly at the press preview, he struck me as bearing remarkable resemblance to descriptions I have read of Picasso – compact yet perfectly built and notably upright, having exceptionally alert features, and, most strikingly, as being preternaturally youthful. McCullin"s peculiar impression of agelessness is all the more striking in someone who has borne witness to such appalling suffering. It is perhaps less surprising if one reflects on the physical fortitude necessary to endure so many wars as well as the percipience required to document them so keenly and with such empathy. Simply put, it would be odd if McCullin appeared run-of-the-mill.

The retrospective spans the whole of McCullin"s career, from some of his first pictures taken around his childhood home in 1958 to very recent work made in 2018 in Homs, Syria. During the 1960s alone he photographed the construction of the Berlin Wall, conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, CIA-funded mercenaries eliminating remaining Lumumbist soldiers in Congo, the Biafran-Nigerian civil war and the consequent famine conditions brought upon Biafran civillians, and the Vietnam War, with a special focus on the American fight to recapture Hu? from North Vietnamese forces.

At this juncture, there is an intermission of sorts in McCullin"s documentation of suffering – he turned his attention back towards London and the British Isles. He proceeded to make astonishingly moving photographs of the homeless in London"s East End, followed by documentation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestant Irish. Although there are outstanding journalistic images of war in the Middle East which follow this period, McCullin had, in my personal estimation, made his best images of conflict by this point. His images from Cyprus, Biafra, and Vietnam in particular have resonances which go far beyond the particular subject matter they record – they speak with exceptional clarity of the universal horror and madness of war. Similarly, his pictures of London"s down-and-outs are some of the most powerful photographic portraits I know. McCullin"s work of this period has a terrible beauty to it. I am aware of no other image-maker who has portrayed the darker realms of the human psyche more effectively.

I spoke to one of the retrospective"s curators, Aicha Mehrez, about McCullin, his work, and the exhibition. She began by telling me about the emphases particular to Tate"s show:"McCullin is very keen on making sure that people understand that he"s had a longstanding engagement with landscape and still-life photography". As with most serious artists, McCullin"s work does not fit into neat and tidy categories – subject-matter which emerges as a nascent interest at one point in his life crops up again in a more developed form later on in his career. Although his work during the "70s in Bradford placed a special focus on England"s Industrial North, he had taken powerful images in a similar vein during the "60s too. These are perhaps best described as social landscape images. They are landscapes with documentary content, and are as much about people as they are about the land (McCullin"s work in this field is part of a healthy photographic tradition, also exemplified in England by Bill Brandt and Chris Killip). Somewhat differently, a profoundly beautiful picture of a dead sparrow in the snow (taken in Hertfordshire in 1970), entirely lacking in documentary content, prefigures his later, purer landscape and still-life work.

The other major focus of Tate"s retrospective is McCullin"s printing. All the images displayed are silver-gelatin prints, made by McCullin himself in his home darkroom in Somerset. "He"s had shows of platinum prints or other prints he hasn"t necessarily printed himself", said Mehrez. "Curatorially, we are trying to get across the balance of his life as a conflict photographer as well as the other areas of his practice and him as a master-printer". Mehrez told me that McCullin has printed the same images "time and time again, refining and refining」, with a view to producing the most emotionally arresting print possible. Although some of the photographs on show were shot on colour film (and in some instances are shown in this format in the exhibition either as projections or in their original magazine context), all of the prints are black and white – McCullin is not a colour photographer.

The quality of McCullin』s prints is outstanding. They have a beautiful tonal range and depth, and are printed at scales which are sensitive to the photographs』 varied subject-matter and by and large uniform pictorial approach (McCullin"s style over the years is, for the most part, very consistent). Aesthetically, the darkness of the prints and the grain present in many of them almost give a sense that they have been smeared in dirt. This in no way diminishes the clarity of McCullin"s pictures, but rather enhances their sense of atmosphere. More technically, the dodging and burning (lightening and darkening of areas of the image by manually varying the exposure of individual sections of the photograph during printing) in the prints is immaculate. A not uncommon failing in otherwise excellent darkroom prints which have been as heavily manipulated as McCullin"s is the visibility of the tonal alterations made by the printer; in this instance, the changes are almost imperceptible. As a printer, McCullin is on a par with the likes of Irving Penn and Ansel Adams (two of photography』s greatest and most noted printers).

My only reservations about the show concern McCullin"s landscape and still-life work (particularly the latter). Although there are stunning landscape images dotted around the galleries which overlap with McCullin"s documentary work, the final room of the show alone is dedicated to landscape and still-life. While there are beautiful landscapes on show, there are all too few, especially given the prominence landscape photography has had in McCullin"s life since the 1980s. A recently published book of McCullin"s landscape work demonstrates that he is one the great photographers of the genre, but the limited display of his work in this field at Tate Britain does not show this. I also feel that his more recent landscape images of classical ruins are weaker than almost all his other work – they are too perfectly-made to have the potency of his other landscapes (I believe this is in part due to what I would guess to be his use of a red-spectrum filter over the lens to achieve his typically dark skies, as opposed to achieving the effect through burning in the darkroom, which emphasises the film"s grain structure, giving a less pristine appearance). Furthermore, there are just six still life photographs on show, tucked in a corner to the left of the exit. Although they make beautiful use of light and are exquisitely composed and printed, they feel somewhat empty to me. Photographers like Edward Weston and Irving Penn set an extremely high bar for still-life photography (a bar as high as that set by McCullin in the fields of conflict, documentary, and landscape photography) – based on the limited showing of McCullin"s work in this field, it does not strike me as being his natural genre.

During my interview with Aicha Mehrez, I asked her what kind of man chose to expose themselves to such danger and to engage with such suffering again and again – in short, what kind of man is Don McCullin? She replied:"He"s amazingly peaceable. He"s an incredibly kind and gentle person. He has this amazing capacity for empathy, although he"s got this dumbfounding ability to put himself in incredibly high-risk situations, although once he gets there it"s not about just documenting what"s going on, it"s about documenting the human cost… It"s this hugely earnest drive to make sure that he conveys the futility of war."

I"d go along with all of that, but I do not think it can fully account for the darkness of his work, or, for that matter, the religious sensibility in his images.There is a striking quote concerning McCullin written by the famous English novelist, John le Carré, which McCullin himself chose to include in his autobiography; I believe that it captures the photographer more completely:

"He has known all forms of fear, he"s an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experiences in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man – like myself, as a matter of fact – for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he"s testing his Maker"s indulgence. To survive is to be condoned and blessed again."

翻譯：楊韞璐

編輯：陳思

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