Polaroid拍立得時代的終結

An instant classicThe Polaroid was beloved of spies, pornographers, cops - and me, but for very different reasons

Mark Lawson
The Guardian, Friday February 15 2008

It's always a poignant moment when technology once cutting-edge begins to be edged out. Dealing recently with a company that still insists on taking orders by fax machine felt like being in one of those Edwardian shops where money and receipts pinged around the eaves in cylinders on wires. And now, this week, we read the obituaries of the Polaroid.

The special smelly, sticky film that made scenes and faces appear magically in your palm - or, in lower temperatures, under your armpit - will no longer be produced because cleaner, even quicker digital has stolen the market for instant images. As a mass medium, the technology was barely in its 40s, which means it outlived the fax and the VCR, but it still feels too soon.

While the news will be of most note to those who were born before the Polaroid was, the passing should be mourned by all who use technology because these rapid cameras heralded two of the governing obsessions of today's culture: immediacy and self-production.

At a time when digital photography has already made it routine for people to process and print their own photographs, this death brings back memories of the years in which - except for obsessives with their own dark-rooms - knowledge of what the family camera had captured could be delayed for weeks - or, when processing was at its most advanced, for at least an hour after you reached the shop. The Polaroid offered liberty from this dependence on professionals with chemicals: a vision that has been fulfilled only now by digital cameras and publication software.

And the fact that the Polaroid has been killed largely by digital photography seems cruel, because it was the older camera that inadvertently hinted at one of the main tricks of the newer ones: the possibility of manipulating the image. Although cameras had always been able to lie, the Polaroid proved a better fibber than most because the developing process meant that the image could be smudged or otherwise interfered with before becoming fixed. Again, this was a preview of what computers would do for shooting.

It's true that the democratisation of photography first offered by the Polaroid was not always, or perhaps even often, used benevolently. The opportunity to take pictures that no one outside the frame ever had to see was of most benefit to the secretive: pornographers, criminals, cops, spies.

Two of these uses came together in the 1963 case that brought the sci-fi-sounding brand name into the English language. The notorious divorce-court pictures of the "headless man" being given head by Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, were taken through this newest of viewfinders. The revelation in evidence that "the only Polaroid camera in the country had been lent to the Ministry of Defence" focused suspicion on the defence minister, Duncan Sandys.

As the cameras spread, they were widely used for private pornography, espionage and law enforcement, changing the speed of policing by creating instant records of events. The device also visibly changed crime and thriller fiction by ending the inevitable existence of two separate sets of images - negatives and prints - which had driven numerous blackmail and break-in plots.

My own favourite Polaroid is a twist on the emergency service purpose. Arriving in an unexpected rush, my daughter was born in a casualty department, an event rare enough for the doctors to capture it on the A&E's instant camera, a rare happy employment of an instrument kept to record assaults for use in evidence. That image - a child's first minute, able to be looked at in her second - is an example of the miracle these portraits could be. Indeed, the Polaroid helped to restore the sense of magic to photography by widening the spooky experience of seeing a piece of paper become a scene.

Artists, whose job is to create such materialisation, inevitably wanted one of these machines around their necks. It's little surprise that Andy Warhol - an artist who was obsessed with capturing the instant - proved to be the Michelangelo of the Polaroid, trigger-happily snapping himself and numerous acolytes over 20 years.

What Warhol liked about the cameras was their speed: it was the closest that photography got to the sketch. David Hockney, though, used the technology with most imagination, creating photo-montages from Polaroided pieces of a scene stuck together, which, because of the gap of at least seconds between the images, creates an image that seems to show a single moment but is composed from hundreds.

The only drawback of the Polaroid was that it offered the shooter no insurance equivalent to negatives or digital storage. Every shot was a one-off and, as it turned out, fragile. That hospital picture of my daughter has deteriorated to the extent that you would date it not in 1995 but a hundred years earlier. These pictures were not meant to last, and nor, it turns out, were the cameras. But, having begun the move of photography from the laboratory to the home, they deserve to be remembered for more than an instant.

comment@guardian.co.uk

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability, Survivability:The Affective Politics of War'

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability, Survivability:The Affective Politics of War'Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

This lecture considers the claim that we feel horror and moral repulsion about the destruction of certain lives and righteous justification about the destruction of other lives. It considers Talal Asad's thesis that under contemporary liberal conditions, state-sponsored violence is more likely to be approved than the violence of counter-insurgency. The affects of horror and righteousness are formed in part through implicit modes of interpreting and imposing differential categories for human lives, producing an unreasoned schism at the heart of moral responsiveness. Through a consideration of Klein that takes her insights firmly outside the domain of ego psychology, we can develop an account of human destructiveness and guilt that ocates survivability in interdependent forms of sociality. Finally, the poems that have recently emerged from the Guantanamo Bay prison suggest that survivability depends upon maintaining a distinction between vulnerability and injurability, and forming affective responses through lyric appeal that politically contest the dominant affective politics of war.
Wednesday 27th February 2008 3pm Room B33 Birkbeck Main Building, Malet St.

Free – all welcome

向Derek Jarman致敬

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TimeOut London No.1955  賈曼專題

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Derek Jarman

前衛電影導演
先鋒藝術家
同志運動鬥士
還有，花園園丁 ~I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave~
賈曼是無法拷貝的原創，進度超前的先驅
逝世14週年，倫敦Serpentine Gallery將在2/23 ~ 4/13
舉行賈曼回顧展，來紀念他的一生
同步推出的，還有Isaac Julien所拍攝的賈曼紀錄片《Derek》

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Derek, the centre of which is a day-long interview Jarman recorded in 1990. The film includes a narration by Tilda Swinton and clips of Jarman’s films, juxtaposed with news and footage of the current affairs from the times that this life illuminated. It is a film of Jarman’s life as well as the story of England from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Derek is supported by Channel 4, Film London and the Sundance Film Fund. The film will premier on More4 and in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition, as part of a season of events celebrating Jarman’s work. This will also include screenings of Jarman’s films on More4 and at Picturehouse cinemas throughout London and the launch of the Jarman Award for artist film-makers, presented by Film London and More4, in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery.
今天在街上走路，天氣異常的好而溫暖
報攤上最新一期的TimeOut London封面
竟是賈曼最鍾愛的演員Tilda Swinton
拿著他的面具入鏡
原來是賈曼專題
賈曼在倫敦街頭與我見面了
雖然內容依舊是TimeOut一貫地過於單薄而少了些具體重量
但這麼感人的封面，有那個認真的電影迷能抗拒得了呢？
我想起十多年前第一次看《藍》，在春暉電影台
完全啞口無言地臣服了
賈曼教我的事，是
啊，原來，電影也能這樣拍啊
第二次看春暉重播，順便錄影，最後那個私藏VHS版
是一個不斷地被吵雜的廣告打斷
畫面旁不斷有跑馬燈蓋在藍色之上
（「大安文山有線電視提醒您......」、「中正區土風舞班招生中......」、「外遇抓姦徵信社」）
原本純粹且自我飽足的image and sound
於是不斷地被周遭浮動的text介入
意義也因此不斷地differ and defer
我以前非。常。厭。惡。這個導演意志被干擾的拷貝
但現在回想，那也變成是某種台灣脈絡下的remix版
原本正經八百的文本，被搞得camp味十足
這倒冥冥間呼應到他另外一些早期戰鬥味道十足經典同志電影裡
常見的那種我就是故意要三八造作，你能怎樣的挑釁敘事風格
那麼這個原本屬於冥想境界的《藍》
倒也同時變成另種「台風化」的俗氣賈曼
在時間所造成的距離下，反倒成為另種美好的記憶

原來，他已經離開我們14年了。