Review of Vanishing and Longing评《消逝与眷恋》

《消逝与眷恋》

许海峰、吕正主编，上海文艺出版社，平装

《消逝与眷恋》一书的出版源于澎湃新闻发起的“上海相册”项目。随手翻开这本书就可瞥见上海不同时代的家宅楼宇、弄堂里巷。但撇去黑白彩色、风格种种不谈，这些影像给人的印象并不连贯。在纪实摄影中，偶尔还会出现大相径庭的拼贴与装置，比如马良将老照片置于颓靡鲜花之中的作品。为何如此跳跃呢？书底的白色页面上，左列22位摄影师的名字，右列22位文字作者的名字，中间则是一一连线后的纵横交错。这一方式简洁说明了本书成形的方式：每一位写作者会收到摄影师不多于800字、去掉了作者信息的自述和不少于20张的照片，之后自行书写作为回应，不限文体与题材。这22回合的内容即组成了这本颇厚重的书。

不过，阅读体验并不如上述的游戏规则这般清晰明了。每一篇文字和图片当然有可呼应之处，毕竟，所有文字和摄影都围绕着“上海”这座城市而生；除了摄影师都以上海的人与事作为对象，文字作者也都有长期的上海生活经验。但是，回应文章有的是探古寻幽的人文地理记录，有的分享自己“扫街”的摄影历程，有的是时光倒流的微型小说，当然还有跟随或不跟随照片追忆自己的成长故事。当文字和摄影都欠缺连续性的质感，虽然纷杂之中，上海无处不在，却并未形散神聚。究其原因，更重要的是本书似乎把“上海”当作不明自显的理由，却未意识到既然上海“一直是被看见同时被写作的城市”（前言作者姜纬语），就更需要追问为何读者要阅读、观看本书中的上海？

其实，书里的摄影和文字中就有互相激发、不断盘桓的题目、经验与情感，最明显的就是上海从80年代到现在不间断的拆迁与更新，而人在其中的际遇与感触往往难以磨灭。摄影师朱峰拍下了在彩色房地产广告牌前堆放的土堆、红砖。写作者王若虚则回忆了自己经历的“城市生命的新陈代谢”，特别是1999年搬去宝山之后，四周从空空荡荡到变得拥挤繁忙，“商场像学会了无性繁殖”。种楠拍摄了20世纪80年代至今的上海街头。席子的静物摄影中，主角是2019年拆迁前金家坊居民家中囤积的物件。而写作者吴栋回忆了自己小时候对没有抽水马桶的外婆家的爱恨交织，而外婆家早已消失，所在的自忠路便是如今的“新天地”。他们的叙述与照片，交织成了跨越代际的上海人在拆迁中的经历。更多作者，即便主题不涉拆迁，也会带出一些历史记忆：btr会记得2016年襄阳公园的改建，三三会记得12号线于2013年开通。

毫无疑问，上海一直在变化。但本书或许可以从弥漫的怀旧情绪稍微跳开些，在“消逝与眷恋”之余追问“什么是上海”，以及这必定众说纷纭的答案对于不同的人意味着什么——何种情感，何种想象，何种代价。比如，周仰意识到自己的摄影重构了已经消逝的石库门中生活的质感，即便她自己是成长于新村，并没有里弄的生活经历。这种重构是她寄寓的情感，而对自身倾向的察觉，会让作者更自觉地处理作为概念、情结与意象的“上海”，从而将“上海”这一主题开拓出更多面向。钱佳楠以自己的生活补充了离开上海这一视角——“因为一切都可以被替代，生活永远有着重构的可能”，正好呼应了这座城市的不断重构。而吴越写作的《鱼刺》勾连起了更多人心里对上海身份的嘀咕。她讲了一个故事：1985年春节，从新疆回家探亲的上海人，在年夜饭上死于一根卡住的鱼刺——“其实只是很小的一根刺，但是他在新疆太久没吃到鱼了，舌头不敏感了，”吴越的妈妈下了这样的结论。而吴越不仅借这根鱼刺引出了与上海有关的、不同代际的分离和迁徙，还触碰了这座城市中一直存在着的人与人之间际遇和话语权上的巨大差异：成长在新村的少年，阔别重洋离开之人，上海郊区长大或搬去了郊区的人，睡在毛坯房里的农民工，青年旅舍里的求职者，谁会觉得自己有权言说上海？

Machine translation (AI) of the Chinese original, not yet reviewed by the author. Please cite the original.

Vanishing and Longing (《消逝与眷恋》)

Edited by Xu Haifeng and Lü Zheng. Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House, paperback

Vanishing and Longing grew out of “Shanghai Album”, a project launched by the news outlet The Paper. Open the book anywhere and you catch sight of Shanghai’s houses and buildings, its lanes and alleys, across different eras. Yet leaving aside black-and-white versus colour and all the differences of style, the images do not add up to a coherent impression. Among the documentary photographs there are occasional collages and installations of an entirely different kind, such as Ma Liang’s work placing old photographs among wilting flowers. Why does it jump around so much? On a white page at the back of the book, the names of 22 photographers run down the left, the names of 22 writers down the right, and between them a criss-cross of lines pairs them off. This neatly explains how the book took shape: each writer received a photographer’s statement of no more than 800 words, with the photographer’s details removed, along with no fewer than 20 photographs, and then wrote a response of their own, in any form and on any subject. These 22 rounds make up this rather hefty book.

The reading experience, however, is not as clear-cut as these rules of the game. Of course each text and set of images have points of contact – after all, all the writing and photography revolve around the city of Shanghai: the photographers all take Shanghai’s people and events as their subject, and the writers have all lived in Shanghai for a long time. But some of the responses are cultural-geographical records of exploring old haunts, some share the writer’s own history of “sweeping the streets” with a camera, some are miniature fictions that turn back time, and of course some – following the photographs or not – recall the writer’s own growing up. When neither the writing nor the photography has any texture of continuity, Shanghai is everywhere in the jumble, yet the scattered parts never gather into a shared spirit. The more important reason may be that the book seems to treat “Shanghai” as a self-evident justification, without realising that precisely because Shanghai “has always been a city that is both seen and written” (in the words of Jiang Wei, author of the preface), it is all the more necessary to ask why readers should read and look at the Shanghai in this book.

In fact, the photographs and texts in the book do contain subjects, experiences and feelings that spark one another and keep circling back. The most obvious is the uninterrupted demolition and redevelopment of Shanghai from the 1980s to the present, and the fortunes and feelings of the people caught up in it, which often prove indelible. The photographer Zhu Feng captured mounds of earth and red bricks piled in front of colourful property billboards. The writer Wang Ruoxu recalls the “metabolism of the city’s life” he lived through, especially after moving to Baoshan in 1999, when his surroundings went from empty to crowded and bustling and “shopping malls seemed to have learned asexual reproduction”. Zhong Nan has photographed Shanghai’s streets from the 1980s to now. In Xi Zi’s still lifes, the protagonists are the things hoarded in residents’ homes in Jinjiafang before it was demolished in 2019. And the writer Wu Dong recalls his childhood love-hate feelings for his grandmother’s home, which had no flushing toilet; it has long since disappeared, and Zizhong Road, where it stood, is now Xintiandi. Their stories and photographs weave together the experience of demolition across generations of Shanghainese. Many more contributors, even when demolition is not their subject, bring up some piece of historical memory: btr remembers the redevelopment of Xiangyang Park in 2016; Sansan remembers Line 12 opening in 2013.

There is no doubt that Shanghai is always changing. But perhaps the book could step a little away from the pervasive nostalgia and, beyond “vanishing and longing”, ask “what is Shanghai?” – and what the inevitably contested answers mean to different people: what feelings, what imaginings, what costs. Zhou Yang, for example, realises that her photographs reconstruct the texture of life in shikumen houses that have already vanished, even though she herself grew up in a workers’ new village (xincun) and never lived in the lanes. This reconstruction is where she places her feelings; and an awareness of one’s own leanings would let an author handle “Shanghai” – as concept, as complex, as image – more self-consciously, and so open the theme up in more directions. Jianan Qian adds, from her own life, the perspective of leaving Shanghai – “because everything can be replaced, life can always be reconstructed” – which happens to echo the city’s own constant reconstruction. And Wu Yue’s “Fishbone” draws out the quiet doubts many people harbour about Shanghai identity. She tells a story: at Spring Festival in 1985, a Shanghainese man back from Xinjiang to visit his family died at the New Year’s Eve dinner from a fishbone stuck in his throat. “It was only a tiny bone, but he hadn’t eaten fish in Xinjiang for so long that his tongue had lost its sensitivity,” was how Wu Yue’s mother summed it up. Through this fishbone Wu Yue not only brings out the separations and migrations across generations bound up with Shanghai, but also touches on the vast differences in fortune and in the right to speak that have always existed between people in this city: the teenager growing up in a new village, those who have left and crossed the oceans, people who grew up in the suburbs or moved out to them, migrant workers sleeping in unfinished flats, job-seekers in youth hostels – who among them would feel entitled to speak about Shanghai?