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英国 Spiked 北京2008系列 之六】照相机从不撒谎 - 但是它却会夸大事实
【标题】The camera never lies – but it exaggerates 照相机从不撒谎 - 但是它却会夸大事实
【来源】http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5499/
【翻译】dakelv
【声明】本文翻译仅限Anti-CNN使用，转载请注明译者及出处。
【译注】本文是Spike Online 的 “2008北京：挑战对中国的污蔑”系列文章之六。全系列一共有二十篇文章。
从本篇译文开始，我将仅挑选有针对性和实效性的文章加以翻译。
【原文】
The camera never lies – but it exaggerates
A recently published series of ‘haunting pictures’ showing Beijing as a polluted, Mad Max-style dystopia were not all that they seemed.
Brendan O’Neill
It is like a scene from New York right after 9/11: cars and bicycles coated in thick grey dust. One photograph shows a red car covered in an ash-like substance, perhaps some form of post-nuclear snow. Another shows a row of rusty bicycles, all of them transformed into lifeless, colourless contraptions by the clouds of oppressive dust.
Only this isn’t New York after an apocalyptic terror attack. It is Beijing on an ordinary day. A city so smothered by pollution that its car windscreens become view-obscuring grey slates and its bikes turn into filthy, creaking machines.
Or at least that is what the photographs – published by the online magazine China Dialogue – seemed to suggest. The reality, it turns out, is rather different.
On 15 July, China Dialogue, a bilingual environmental magazine edited in London and Beijing, published a series of photos by British photographer Sean Gallagher. Taken in the dead of night on the streets of Beijing, the 15 pictures show various vehicles coated in the residue of a filthy smog. Some of the cars are so subsumed by soot that you cannot tell what colour they are.
The photo-essay was titled ‘Air pollution in Beijing’. An accompanying blurb said: ‘As the Olympics approach, athletes have raised concerns about the Chinese capital’s smoggy skies. A series of haunting pictures… illustrates the problem.’ (1)
Readers were left with the distinct and queasy impression of a city so polluted that dirt descends on everything. It looked like a scene from Mad Max. How can athletes be expected to run in a city where even cars – those most mobile machines – end up buried beneath dirt?
Yet before long, some of China Dialogue’s readers, including readers based in Beijing, started complaining. All of these filthy cars lined up in sooty streets… it just doesn’t look like our city, they said. The scenes depicted in the photos are ‘not normal in the summer of Beijing’, said one.
Another reader – Shaojie Liu, who has lived in Beijing for 10 years – was similarly shocked by the pictures, writing: ‘We cannot say that the air here in Beijing is great. However, we don’t have conditions that bad.’ Others asked whether the photos really were taken in the city; one Beijing-based reader commented: ‘After I read the article I looked out my window again, and the sky is very blue and very clean.’
Another suspected that the photos show something more natural than manmade pollution: ‘It looks like the photos were taken after a sandstorm in Beijing. There is definitely a pollution problem in China. But these images may be a… misleading way to illustrate China’s pollution problem in general.’ One angry reader denounced the seemingly alien photographs as ‘CNN-style photos’, which present a ‘biased report on China’.
A week after the photo-essay first appeared – on 21 July – the editors of China Dialogue finally posted a note clarifying what the images reveal. The photos were taken in Beijing, but ‘most of them depict vehicles that have been left or abandoned under the raised ring roads in the city centre’, the note said.
It continued: ‘The photographer has not set out to show ordinary cars in the Chinese capital; he uses abandoned vehicles as static objects, which illustrate the quantity of dust and sand that accumulates in the city’s air.’ Sand? Yep, according to the editor’s note: ‘Some of this dust is from naturally occurring sandstorms, but… much of it also comes from the booming construction industry.’
In short, a ‘series of haunting pictures’ that was said to ‘illustrate the problem’ of Beijing’s smoggy skies – and which, we were left to believe, showed normal cars in normal streets in the city – actually showed something that will be familiar to citydwellers the world over: abandoned vehicles covered in crap. There are dumped cars and vans across London coated in dust and smudged filth; sometimes people write ‘Clean me’ on them.
If you left a car under an intersection in London that is as busily jam-packed as Beijing’s raised ring roads – say, by the North Circular Road – then it wouldn’t be long before it, too, was sprayed grey with exhaust fumes, pollutants and dust, resembling something from I Am Legend.
The revelation that some of the stuff on the cars came from sandstorms (which explains the yellowish tinge to these ominous pollutants) vindicates some of the readers who complained. As one reader said before the editor’s note was published: ‘Sandstorms only happen for a few days in Spring. The captions of the photos don’t clarify the situations surrounding the photos. To some degree they are misleading the audience.’
The photos were real. And they really were taken in Beijing. They were not doctored in any way. Yet in presenting photos of abandoned cars under busy raised roads after a sandstorm as illustrations of the Olympian problem of Beijing’s smoggy skies, the series of haunting pics did give a severely skewed impression of modern Beijing.
As one reader said: ‘If photos taken near a rubbish dump are used to show that the whole city is dirty like that, the problem lies elsewhere.’ Indeed. Across the Western media, too often the dirtiest bits of Beijing – the ‘rubbish dump’ areas – are held up as illustrations of the whole city. The debate about Beijing’s pollution problem is driven more by our own fin de siècle fears that China is choking its own people, and potentially the world, rather than by a clear-eyed view of what Beijing is really like. The discussion of China’s environment has become super-moralised, with some people seeing a dirty dystopia where none exists.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
(1) Slideshow: air pollution in Beijing, China Dialogue, 15 July 2008
]【截图】
【译文】
照相机从不撒谎 - 但是它却会夸大事实
最近发表的一组“令人难以忘怀的照片”把北京描述成一个污染的、疯狂的麦克斯式（1）的反乌托邦（2）之地。但是事实却不是这样。
【译注（1）：《疯狂的麦克斯》是著名演员 MelGibson主演的一部影片。这是一部以未来为时代背景的科幻片，那时的世界十分荒凉且资源贫乏，杀人已经不是什么新鲜事。公路上时演有飞车党抢动燃料运输车，警员们既要和劫匪拼杀又要承受环境带来的巨大压力。（简介来源：http://www.dvdspring.com/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=18）】
【译注（2）：反乌托邦主义反映的是与理想社会相反的，一种极端恶劣的社会最终形态。这种社会里充斥着无法控制的各种弊病，如阶级矛盾，资源紧缺，犯罪，迫害，战争，疾病等，刻画出一个令人绝望的未来。（来源：维基百科）】
作者：Brendan O'Neill
这个场景看起来很像911以后的纽约：汽车和自行车上覆盖着一层厚厚的灰尘。其中一张照片上，有一辆红色轿车上盖着一层灰烬一样的东西，看起来好像是某种核爆炸过后飘落下来的尘雪。另外一张照片里有一排锈迹斑斑的自行车，在沉重的灰尘的覆盖下，它们变成了一堆了无生命和色彩的机械装置。
只是这并不是经历了末日般恐怖袭击后的纽约。这是一个平常日子里的北京。这个城市被污染压得透不过起来，汽车的挡风玻璃变成了阻挡视线的一块灰色的石板；自行车也变成了肮脏而吱嘎作响的机器。
或者至少这是在《中外对话》网络杂志上发表的照片想表达的意思。而事实，却与此大相径庭。
七月十五日，《中外对话》 -- 一份在伦敦和北京出版的双语网络杂志 -- 刊登了一系列由英国摄影师 Sean Gallagher拍摄的照片。这些照片拍于夜深人静的北京街头，这十五张照片拍的是各种各样的车辆被肮脏的烟雾沉积物覆盖的情形。有些轿车完全被煤烟覆盖，以至于它们本来的颜色都看不出来了。
这篇图片报道的题目是“北京的空气污染”。旁白写道：“随着奥运会的临近，运动员对中国首都烟雾笼罩的天空表现出关切。本系列令人难忘的照片。。。描述了这个问题。”（1）
看完这篇图文报道后，留在读者脑海的是对这个城市深刻而令人作呕的印象 -- 在这个城市里，一切都被灰尘覆盖着。这看起来像是《疯狂的麦克斯》里的一个场景。在这个城市里，连车辆这样流动性最强的机器都逃不了被灰尘覆盖的命运，又怎么能指望运动员在这里赛跑？
《中外对话》图文报道
然而不久，《中外报道》的一些读者，包括来自北京的读者，就开始抱怨了。他们说，这些停在烟尘弥漫的路边上的肮脏的汽车，这看起来根本不是我们的城市的样子。其中一位读者谈到照片里的情景时说，“感觉北京在夏天的时候非常不容易出现这样的污染。”。另外一个在北京住了10年的名叫刘绍杰【译注：音译】的读者，看到这些照片后很吃惊，他说“我们不能说北京的空气非常好，但是也绝对不会出现类似图片中的情况。”还有人问这些照片是否真的是在北京拍摄的；一个家住北京的读者评论到“看了这个文章又看看窗外，天很蓝很干净啊。”
另外一个读者怀疑照片里显示的是比认为污染更自然的一种污染：“看上去这是在北京经过一场沙尘暴后照的照片。北京确实存在污染，这不是什么秘密，但用这些照片来展示北京的整体污染状况有误导之嫌。”一个愤怒的读者谴责这些看起来非常古怪的照片是“一组CNN式照片”，表现了“对中国的偏见”。在这篇报道刊登一周后的七月二十一日，《对话中国》的编辑终于发出了一个有关这些照片的澄清声明。声明中说，这些照片是在北京拍摄的，但是“其中大部份照片所描述的车辆，已被长期放置或废弃在北京市中心的立交环线公路下面。”
接下来，声明中说，“在这组照片中，摄影师并不是要展示出一般在北京行驶的车辆，而是利用废弃的车辆作为静物，藉此说明北京空气中所含的沙尘数量。”沙尘？是的，根据编辑的声明，“空气中部份的沙尘是来自沙尘暴，但是。。。相当一部份的沙尘是由于发展快速的建筑业所致。”
简而言之，一系列旨在”描述北京烟雾弥漫的天空“的”让人难以忘怀的照片” -- 这些照片给我们的印象是它们描述的是北京市正常路段的正常车辆 -- 到头来竟然是全世界城市居民都很熟悉的东西 -- 被赃物覆盖的遗弃车辆。整个伦敦都有盖满灰尘和污垢被遗弃的轿车和公务车；有时人们还会在上面写上“把我打扫干净”。如果你把车辆停在伦敦某个和北京的换成立交桥一样繁忙的立交桥下面 -- 比如说北环路【译注：伦敦的路名】 -- 很快你的车辆也会被尾气、污染物和灰尘弄得灰蓬蓬的，就像《我是传奇》里的场景一样。
正如有的读者指出，车上的有些灰尘是来自于沙尘暴（这也就是为什么那些可怕的污染物看起来有点发黄），所以那些读者的抱怨也是情有可原的。有一位读者在编辑发表上述解释性的声明之前说，“沙尘暴只有在春天发生，而且只持续几天。图片说明没有解释清楚照片拍摄时的情景。从某种意义上来说它们有误导读者之嫌。”
这些照片是真的，而且确实是在北京拍摄的。照片也没有经过修改。但是用一些沙尘暴后遗弃在繁忙的天桥下的一组照片来描述北京奥运会来临之际北京充满烟雾的天空，这一系列难以忘怀的照片确实是对现代北京的一种歪曲描述。
正如一位读者说说，“如果用一张垃圾场的照片来说明一个城市很脏，那么这就是另外一个问题了。”确实如此。整个西方新闻界往往把北京最脏的地方 -- 比如“垃圾场” -- 拿出来作为整个城市的写照。有关北京污染问题的争论实际上是受我们自身的世界末恐惧所驱使，而不是受实事求是地认识北京这种清醒的观点所驱使。 我们所害怕的就是，中国正在使它的人民窒息，而且也很有可能使整个世界窒息。有关中国的环境问题的讨论已经被超级道德化，很多人在反乌托邦根本不存在的地方却看到了它。
Brendan O'Neill 是 spiked 杂志的高级编辑。
（1）幻灯：北京的空气污染， 《中外对话》， 2008.7.15 |
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