Helen Levitt纽约摄影师：海伦·莱维特

Helen Levitt, photographer of New York, died on March 29th, aged 95

纽约摄影师海伦·莱维特于3月29日过世，终年95岁

OVER the course of her long life, many people wanted to ask Helen Levitt about her photographs. She always refused, at least as far as public pronouncements were concerned. “I’m inarticulate,” she would say. “I express myself with images.” Or, “If I could say that, I wouldn’t have to take pictures.”

      海伦·莱维特漫长的一生中，常有许多人想要打听她的照片。不过至少就她的公开声明来看，莱氏总是拒绝发表高见。她会说，“我这人不善言辞，图片就是我的表达方式。”或曰“如果能说清它们，我也就没必要端起相机了”云云。

The result was that few people knew her, outside professional photographers and her poker circle. And that was fine with her. She lived defiantly alone except for Binky, her tabby cat. The only photograph released of her after her death showed a not-unpretty face, crop-haired and heavily lipsticked, about to scowl. She was in her 50s then, and looked as though the camera had outraged her.

      结果是，除了职业摄影师与她的牌友之外，知道莱氏的人寥寥无几。于她而言，这没什么不快。她的独居生活看上去充满挑衅，如果你没把那只斑点猫Binky算在内的话。她死后传出来的那张惟一的单身照是这样的：一张容貌并非不姣好的脸，短发，搽着厚厚的口红，脸色阴沉地像是要动了肝火。那时的她年过半百，似乎那台机子已将她彻底激怒。

More determined interviewers tracked her to the fourth floor of the walk-up brownstone on East 13th Street where she lived for most of her life. The stairs didn’t deter her, despite her sciatica and a strange, lifelong inner-ear disorder that made her feel “wobbly” all the time. But in her last decade she found her old Leica was getting too heavy to carry about, and switched to a Contax automatic. It was a poignant moment. She had been inspired to use a 35mm Leica by Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, after trailing him one day in 1935 as he took photographs round the wharves of Brooklyn. He became a great admirer of her work. She thought any comparison of herself with him was ridiculous.

      越发执意的采访者一路尾随她，直到拐进位于东十三街的那栋褐沙石楼房，跟上了四楼。莱氏就在这个没有电梯的地方度过大半生。她的坐骨神经这时开始发痛，腿脚很不利索，伴随终生的内耳紊乱失调亦带给她一直摆脱不了的眩晕感———尽管如此，那楼梯还是拦不住她。而在生命中最后十年期间，她却发现那台老式莱卡相机正变得日渐沉重，已不再适合随身携带。她不得不改换门庭，用了一台康泰克斯自动相机。那是多么酸楚难过的一瞬！还记得1935年的那天，亨利·卡蒂埃-布勒松正在布鲁克林的码头附近拍照，她居然也会跟着这名法国人。此后，一台35mm的莱卡机便一直激励着她。布勒松后来成为莱氏之作的一名伟大的仰慕者。而她则认为任何将她自己与布勒松相提并论的观点都是荒谬的。

Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.

      她的照片通常有关西班牙移民居住的哈莱姆区与纽约下东区。上世纪三、四十年代，莱氏曾用黑白照（如银盐版成像）对它们加以呈现，而在六、七十年代则改用染印版彩照。期间，她还参与过电影制作。莱氏的摄影主题始终如一，即拍摄纽约的条条街道。除去她1941年的墨西哥城旅行外，莱维特从未在她的生活中发现还有比这更好的表现题材。

The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.

      （表现）那些沙砾般坚韧的城市部分便是她的特别乐趣。她的世界是破败不堪的街道、碎石迷乱的建筑工地、仓库以及垃圾遍地的楼梯。这是一种风格更为粗粝的都市摄影：天空被肢解成碎片，没有树。1938年，与沃克·埃文斯交往期间，她曾借用此人的相机，（“当然”）也和他有过性关系。埃文斯跟她一样，已经习惯在市中心而不是去郊区“游猎”了。她所拍摄的那些粉头嫩脑的男人身披松垮的“组特服”，头戴浅顶软呢帽，慵懒地站着，那种威胁味一眼便能看穿。不过，她带回来的影像大部分还是那些爱说三道四的娘们儿以及她的最爱———争先恐后的小孩儿。就像埃文斯展示给她的那样，即便是乘地铁时莱氏正好坐在拍照对象旁边，直角取景器也可让她神不知鬼不觉地完成拍摄。

Here and there 影像，无处不在

Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.

      她出生在布鲁克林，其父曾在这里打理过针织衫批发生意。那时的她极渴望做些更有韵味的事儿，却发现她少了点绘画细胞。因为学过一阵子的芭蕾，她懂得欣赏人体造型的美，这也教会她未来去捕捉那些儿童身上天真无邪的优雅。中学辍学后，莱氏便在弗洛里·米切尔的商业人像摄影工作室的暗房里打工，周薪为6美元。从此她与摄影有了不解之缘。

A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing—a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building—would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.

      她认为一幅好影像的诞生只不过是运气使然。但她身上那种纽约人的直觉似乎指引着她，分明告诉她要去何处守候理想的作品。一辆抛锚了的小车将会很快吸引车主平躺在它的身下，端详着引擎罩或是尝试去费力推那车子。被丢弃在人行道上的一张藤椅会引来一名衔着雪茄手拿报纸的长者，抑或是一位丰满的妙龄女郎穿着睡袍之类的衣服在闷热的空气中被捂成了快发蔫的黄花菜。如果走运，连狗都会跑出来。那些毛发蓬乱数日未浴的杂种狗，或是刚刚被香波浸泡过的狮子狗也会在人前晃悠。一辆货箱已敞开的卡车会向你展示，蹲在许多麻袋上的送货人正耷着头，似乎愁绪满怀，或是抱着几捆粉色蓝色的衣包在那呼呼打盹。任何遭废弃的东西———如一件茶叶箱、一个镜框和一栋空荡建筑的柱式入口———都会立马招来几拨过家家的小孩在那打闹嬉戏，或是划拳，或是攀爬，或是扭打，小小的肢体化作无比丰富的造型，扭动着。

Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.

      她的照片不会写上名字。“纽约”，再加年份，便是大部分莱氏之作的标签。它们无需解释，它们“仅仅是你所目睹的一切”。许多影像都有海报、涂鸦或广告牌这样的画面背景，这些东西代替了解说词。“特供意式细面条，25美分”、“禁止张贴”、“烤坚果，天天有”、“欲寻扣子及小物件，请上楼”、“比尔琼斯的老母是个表（婊）子”（此处的hore，疑为whore之误———译者），诸如此类。刚出道时，莱氏用二手相机，处女作是拍摄人行道上儿童的粉笔画。她从未想过要去揣摩这些小孩，她只关心小家伙们鼓捣出来的那些图案。

In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multicoloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.

      六十年代，莱维特在获得古根海姆两次资助后，开始选择她的彩色街道摄影。这种颇为繁复尚未成熟的转型最终令她情绪沮丧。而那些街道也已今非昔比。猴崽子们已不再外出顽皮，只猫在家里看电视。不过，在她昔日于黑白世界中期待发掘优雅与影像质感的地方，如今的彩照似乎并未“稍逊风骚”。那些美，你能在泡泡糖机器中五彩缤纷的小球中找到，你能从一名女孩光彩夺目的服装上找到，你能在一只搭配在商店橱窗架上的红色细高跟鞋那儿找到。她的那些出了故障的小车，如今则是倚在粉饰着灰泥的墙壁边上的花哨野兽。除掉那层斑驳的外衣，绿色的门口便会有裘皮女、粉色卷毛女或橙色条纹袜女朝你款款而来。

She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.

      莱氏并不高估自己的作品。尽管她的早期摄影已炒至数万美元，她也只是将它们搁在她公寓那些盒子里，贴上的标签不过是“概无佳品”或“无处不在”。她起先希望照片某种程度上能像社会主义者的陈情书，但布勒松的建议则让她抛弃了这个想法。就像她曾极勉强地承认那样，她的某些堪称“佳作”的作品不失为自身就能独立存在的艺术品，但它们亦是纪念纽约城这样一件信手而来、熙攘喧嚣的艺术品的莱氏庆典。