英国essay范文：摄影术历史及现状研究

作为一项最先在19世纪30年代的法国和英国宣布的发明，摄影快速发展成为了一门产业，激发并挑战了其他的艺术媒介，不可避免的影响了欧洲的现代文化与教育。然而尽管摄影在发明之后的头二十年就在全世界流传，一百年之后才开始有学者研究其历史，评价来自成千上万业余摄影爱好者和摄影专家们的图像作品。摄影技术百年纪念的到来，激发了至少五个欧洲国家的历史学家们来调查研究摄影的根源与进化，但是这些研究集中于该媒介在美国和欧洲的发展。随后的数十年，西方历史学家们依然没有关注到亚洲、非洲和拉丁美洲的摄影。

在韩国摄影历史的书面资料中，摄影被标记为一项外来技术，不得不被吸收进韩国传统的视觉文化形式中去。这些历史编纂学基本上将摄影定性为来自西方和日本的外来媒介，，韩国的摄影依然处在由外来文化机构设定的有限的文化和政治领域。

An invention first announced in France and England in 1830s, photography quickly flourished as an industry, inspired and challenged other fine arts media, and irrevocably affected modern culture and learning in Europe. Yet while the practice of photography spread worldwide within its first two decades, it was a hundred years before scholars began to write its history or evaluate the plethora of images created by millions of amateurs and professionals. The approach of photography’s centennial encouraged historians in at least five European countries to investigate its roots and evolution, but these histories focused on the medium’s development in the United States and Europe. In the decades since, Western histories have sill largely failed to address the photography of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In writing history of photography in Korea, photography has been persistently labeled as a “foreign” technology that must be uncomfortably assimilated in traditional Korean forms of visual culture. Those historiographies primarily have characterized photography as “foreign medium” from the West and Japan and also situate the perception of photography in Korea as a limited cultural and political domain that was shaped by the cultural agencies from the “outside.” They often conceal the capacity to generate foreignness as a mere technique to typify foreigners, be they peasants, ethnic minorities, criminals, and the uncivilized. In other words, they show how photography has been projected and misrecognized in the complex relations of mutual othering that have traversed the process of modernization of Korea, not only the colonial gaze in its photographic mode, but also the histories by which photography came to be integrated with other aesthetic traditions as the source of their fracturing and preservation through arrest. How, then, can we write the history of photography in Korea without making it appear either as a mere case study of a universal phenomenon or as an absolutely particular and hence untranslatable experience which remains mute in the face of comparative aspirations? How can we tell this history, or rather, these histories, without hypostatizing as an essence the space called Asia or non-West? How can we reveal the intersections of modernity and coloniality through looking at historical formation of cultural agency?

In this paper, I do not attempt to examine how and what Western epistemology excludes from the history of photography in Korea as a process of modernization or imperialization. Rather, I seek to look at the early historical formation of photography in an analysis of double translation among European language-Japanese-Korean as a way that meanings, values, and knowledge circulate in the context of late nineteenth century of Korea. To do so, I will interrogate translation, beyond the domain of the word—oral or written—and beyond the literary model that has pervaded thinking about translation in the recent past. By examining its geopolitics, I intend to address these questions: how photography as “foreign medium” translated into shashin (in Japanese, 写真) and then sajin (in Korean, 寫眞) through double translation; what the implications of double translation would be within the context of East Asia under the overarching Japanese empire hegemony; how and why double translation implies “colonial difference”; how we can look at photography which stands at the intersection of a number of aspects of modernity and coloniality; and finally, how we think of colonial difference or imperial formations comparatively.

Geopolitics of Translation and Transculturation

Japanese and Western historians have attempted to illuminate multiple relations among metropoles and colonies by challenging the singular history of media’s development centered on the Europe and the United States. Those studies seem to share Harootunian’s concept of “co-existing or co-eval modernity,” paying attention to the shared experience of temporality that a society develops, emphasizing the possibility of difference. While Meiji Japan is usually described as having a pattern like “pendulum swings between old and new,” recent studies put more emphasis on the interactions between Japanese societies and Western civilization, tradition and modernity, in diverse cultural spheres. Even though they are still bound up in such dichotomies, these approaches shed light on the idea of dynamic interactions by looking at how Western influence resonated with Japanese socio-political conditions and, in doing so, how Japanese translated Western knowledge and technologies and used them to build their culture and national identity.

For example, some English- and Japanese-language works on early Japanese photography examine how Japanese photographers developed after the 1850s, and how they paralleled or diverged from those of the Western tradition. From its inception, Japanese photography has been tied to Western photography, and much of its early history relates to the history of Meiji Japan’s changing relationship with the West. Those studies begin with the fact that the first generation of Japanese to learn photography received instruction from Western photographers living in Japan. Therefore, what important here is how early photography as technology and art translated into Japanese visual/verbal language. Their work showed an awareness of the Western style of portraiture combined with distinctive Japanese elements. In the process of translation, Japan also reinvented its own elements to represent itself to the world and recognized the need for these elements to be represented as exotic objects to the West. As Kinoshita Naoyuki points out, when the Japanese first encounter photography, their initial question was not about what photography is, but what it meant and how it could be situated within its own local context. Thus much of the discourses on photography in this period focused on how to name it and how to utilize it for more realistic visual production. In doing so, the concept of “shashin (写真),” which had two other distinct meanings in earlier times, became the word that refers photography. Since the T’ang dynasty the term had been used in the sense of “portraiture,” and in the Ranga (Dutch [i.e. European] painting) theory of the late eighteenth century shashin meant Western realism. The term shashin was still used in its three meanings until the end of Edo period, but thereafter it came to refer exclusively to “photography”. In Japan, the very value of photography was the fact that it can draw the real, capture and reserve the real time, and index the being. Thus it was not surprise that shashin, which literally means drawing the real but also signifies captured the being, fits into the term photography. This process of translation included negotiations with former local media (i.e. Western painting style of portraits (Yoga), lithography) and people who engaged artistic and socio-economic fields in the metropole.Otsuki Gentaku (1799) and Shiba Kokan (1811) translated Shashin-kyo (camera) to Dutch word donkelcamer, or camera obscrura

In Korea, the process of translation is more complicated within its historical context. The first three decades in the history of Korean photography—from the arrival in Korea of the first camera in 1883 to the annexation in 1910—coincided with a period of transformation and modernization in Korean society. After Korea embarked on a course of rapid modernization in awareness of and conflict with the West, photography evolved hand-in-hand with these changes, advancing in fits and starts as Korea began to adopt Western science and technology, eventually emerging as an innovative and entrepreneurial industry within the growing but limited market capitalist economy. Korean intellectuals encountered photography in Japan and China in the early 1880s, and the first generation of Korean photographers explored the new technology and craft in Seoul. Like their Western and Japanese predecessors, the Korean photographers began with portraits and memorial photography, and these became the core business of the first few commercial studios of the 1880s, mainly located in Seoul, but photographywas not yet fully instituted by the Chosŏn Government and its driving force of Enlightenment. Within civilization and enlightenment discourses, photography was translated as Western-via-Japan-derived concepts. Although sajin(寫眞), signifying photography in Korean, came from the usage of shashin, other diverse terms mixed with forms and values of own local media, such as ch’osang(肖像), ch’inyong(眞影), and yŏng(影).

Not only did photography undergo a translation in concept, but also as a practice of visual production and consumption. It became caught up with modernization as well as imperialism by becoming an instrument of expanding Western and Japanese hegemony over Korea as photographers created new images and perspectives that constructed Korea’s new position in the world. By the end of nineteenth century, Western hegemony was established, before Japan began to champion itself over other nations in Asia. Following Western hegemony, Japan emerged as a significant player in the colonizing contest in Asia with the takeover of Taiwan in 1895 and the annexation of Korea in 1910. During this time, thousands of photographs left Korea, taken by the hands and eyes of tourists and intellectuals, but mostly those were made by imperial projects around the peninsula. Photos were not only taken by Westerners finding “the Far East” and “the Orient,” but the Japanese created a large photographic archive of famous Korean natural and historical sites as well as people even before the annexation. In other words, diverse imperial agencies intervened in the process of Korean constitution to a global audience, illustrating that photography as part of the complex of colonialism and its translations cannot be one-way or linear in Korea.

In terms of the politics of translation, Lydia Liu situates it in the context of coloniality. She combines linguistics and semiotic theory with Marxist notions of exchange value to signal broader contexts of power difference that inform the relations between China and the West. She argues that a theory of translation must consider circumstantial meetings of languages and people that are based on interactive and conflicting processes in the colonial context, rather than on fixed identities. In doing so, she taps into the violence accompanying colonization and colonial relations as well as the cooperation of colonial intellectuals in translating from English to Chinese. As she argues, translation shows “a reciprocal wager, a desire for meaning as value and a desire to speak across” in its practices by not promising the reciprocity of meaning but offering translatability between historical languages based on the fact that meanings cannot be equally commensurable in actual power relations. In applying Liu’s theories, it will be helpful to delineate the translation of photography in Korea, which is a practice that incorporates and engages other media such as painting and lithography and indexically is a property shared by these different media from the very beginning. But Liu does not question the geopolitical directionality of translation, which is the relation between language, knowledge, and power.

To pose a question on the formations of subjectivity in the sites and processes of translation, Naoki Sakai’s idea of a “scheme of co-figuration” seems a more useful means of conceptualizing how an ethno-linguistic community is rendered representable, thereby constituting itself, from which a base of national sovereignty can be built. This self-constitution of the nation does not proceed unitarily but, on the contrary, its figure constitutes itself by making visible the figure of the other with which it engages in a relationship of translation. Because the two nations are represented as equivalent in co-figuration, however, it is possible to determine them as “conceptually different,” and their difference is construed as a specific difference between national identities. Nonetheless, cultural difference, which calls for the process of translation, is not a conceptual difference but incommensurability. Just as in the co-figuration of “the West” and “the East” by which the West represents itself, constituting itself by positing “the East” as “the other,” conceptual difference has allowed one term to be evaluated as superior to the other. At the same time, it naturalizes the temporal difference in the way of “the West” looking at the other, as Johannes Fabian points out how the concept of time is a crucial “carrier of significance,” defining the unequal relation of self and other. While Naoki Sakai’s political vision stems from the translation of Western thought into Japanese thought and vice versa, all the while confronted with the hegemony of the state, these approaches to translation seem to want to prove that an original, multiple way of thinking is legitimized in its existence by the European master’s deconstructions. However, I think this need for legitimation only restores the colonial directionality of translation.

Still, the centrality of the concept of exchange value in Liu’s argument allows her to recognize contexts of translation as exchange not only of verbal and symbolic concepts but also of material objects or “tokens” as she calls them. The terms seem useful in order to think about translation as a situated practice that includes various forms of engagement. Even though these discourses of translation have opened a new space to discuss incommensurability that might be “ground for comparison and basis of equivalence,” they overlook the deeper problem of geopolitical directionality of translation based on colonial difference. In fact, translation itself could not reveal the hierarchies of power between nations and has been and is shaped by the coloniality of power and the colonial difference in the nation-building project. Modern nation-states reproduced, within the territorial frontiers, the structure of power put in place by the colonial model. This is why coloniality of power is not a question related only to colonial periods, but also to the entire “modern/colonial world-system.” Such models on dialectics between the West and the East cannot fully illuminate coloniality of power in translation that has multiple vectors, as with the Japanese empire and its colonies. In order to open the places to weigh a potential comparison of colonial models, we cannot limit our perspective to the categories of comparison among/between European colonies and Japanese colonies. Japanese empire had taken much part of its model and ideology from Western empires. This is why we need to take up a transnational perspective to illuminate colonialism and double translation that operate over a singular national boundary.

Perhaps the concept of transculturation, introduced in 1940 by Fernando Ortiz, could help clarify what to prioritize in the issues raised by multiple directions of translation. Ortiz sought to correct the unidirectional process of translation and acculturation in British anthropology. For him, transculturation was a tool for thinking about nation-building in a society wherever homogeneity had to account for mestizaje. More importantly, however, it also indirectly underscored how cultural transformations do not go only from East to West but also from West to East or North to South and South to North. The fact remains that transculturation was a process perceived from a postcolonial society, while Bronislaw Malinowski viewed “acculturation” only from the vantage point of a colonizing nation.… transculturation better expresses (than acculturation) the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English world acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. (my emphasis)

Transculturation works multi-directionally in the social life of things, as he demonstrated with tobacco and sugar. It translates an object that transforms modes of being and thinking while also transforming the “original” use and life of that object. On a larger scale, a world process made Cuba what Cuba was as a nation-state in the first half of the twentieth century. As Ortiz states in the quote, he meant to call attention to the complex and multidirectional processes in cultural transformation, beyond the boundary of race and culture, yet at the same time he is less concerned with the coloniality itself, which is absolutely the other pole of transculturation in Cuba. Even though he unfolds the discussion on the multi-directions of cultural formation in colony, transculturation fails to illuminate colonial differences in non-European states without concerns of geopolitical directions.

In this respect, Walter Mignolo addresses the questions of how and where we could look at colonial difference in historical imperial formations. He argues the colonial difference in the modern/colonial world is the location of cosmologies in conflict articulated by the coloniality of power. According to him, what is at stake in the concept of translation or transculturation is related to borders established by colonial difference. His conceptualization seems to run contrary to the concept of translation and transculturation generally known and defined in the territorial internal domain of empires (e.g. between English and Spanish), as well as contrary to the singular direction of translation on the external borders of the modern/colonial world-system where colonial difference operates (e.g., between English and Hindi, English and Arabic, English and Japanese) He points out that there should be another dimension to the inequality of languages, and not just between English and Swahili, or between Ainu and Japanese. The various imperial languages are themselves unequal, as with Japanese vis-a-vis English. What is crucial here is how hegemonic languages and the location of knowledges have built and engaged in an indigenous perspective, epistemologies, and histories. Further, European epistemologies have hidden or left out the historical conjunctions of the non-West. Then, based on the concerns toward geopolitics of translation, some questions remain: how could we think about the colonial difference of Korea, built from the Japanese empire, which took its lessons from European imperial formations such as the British and Dutch? If we consider multi-directional translations in metropoles and colonies, how do we understand colonial difference of Korea, which has undergone both Western and Japanese imperialism? If we take Mignolo’s suggestion on the “border thinking,” “where” could we rethink?

Double Translation and its Potential for Comparison

Scholars still debate when and how photography first came into Korea. However, if we think of the complex aspects of photographic practice—which includes production, circulation, agencies, materials, and spectatorships—it could be situated within the multiple translations of Western and Japanese knowledge in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea. Before Koreans became involved in photographic practices, diverse Western agents—missionaries, journalists, and delegates—appeared in Korea and produced travelogues. They deeply engaged in establishing the first official photography department (撮影局, K: Ch‘waryŏngguk) in 1883, which was associated with administrative reforms in the 1880s by King Kojong. Simultaneously, after Japanese commercial photographers came into Korea, they opened commercial studios and sold pictures near harbors. Those practices have critical role in the dissemination of photographic practices and knowledges by engaging imperial and national events in Korea. But what is at stake here is that how multi-directional translations—I would say double translation—took place in this historical conjunction.

Western knowledges (languages) --- Japanese knowledges (languages) --- Korean knowledges (languages)

Double translation here is twofold: first, it is translations intertwined multi-directional geopolitics between metropoles and colonies; second, it has much potential to envision hidden colonial difference in historical formations from the perspective of borders. Double translation occurs not only in conjunctures of colonial difference, but it has actually inscribed them. For instance, the complicated constitutions of sajin in Korea cannot be seen either from the Western or the Japanese metropoles’ perspective. In looking and thinking from the local context, from the border where colonial difference lies, we can only draw the process of double translation, which comes by necessity with decolonization.

In terms of decolonization, however, Miglono critically emphasizes the politics of “double critique” from the people within colonial difference caught between two epistemologies. The term conveys the double task of critique: it attempts to deconstruct Western epistemologies, hegemonies, and ethnocentrism, and on the other, the critique emerged from within colonies local history. Additionally, it leads to rethinking the hegemonic Eurocentric paradigm categories from the very beginning. As Fanon points out, it carries out the necessary diagnosis of the epistemic colonization (of souls, of minds, of spirits, of beings) and traces it to the perverse logic of coloniality that distorts, disfigures, and destroys every past that is not the past of the Eurocentric version of history. The practice of decolonization is initiated with the recognition, in the first place, of the colonization of knowledge and the use of imperial knowledge to repress colonized subjectivities. The process moves from there to build structures of knowledge that emerge from the experience of marginalization that has been and continues to be enacted by the implementation of the colonial power.

To recognize politics of double translation in the history of photography in Korea, first of all, we need to find ruptures in the narrative of Japanese and Korean histories as part of decolonizing histories. The narrative of Japan has integrated colonial experiences into its attempts to expand territories and assimilate the colonized as imperial subjects during the colonial period. The narrative of Korea has neglected complex facets of identity formations and the agency of colonial populations. However, interactions between the islands cannot be comprehended solely as “reactions” to “impacts,” an interpretation that offers a way to avoid the problems rooted in the perspective of metropoles. Nor is it enough to say that we need to see beyond the binary dichotomies so easily delineated between the colonizer and colonized, between a monolithic external power and an oppressed population divided into either resistors or collaborators. Rather, it might be more productive to take up ruptures that show directions and locations of translation. I wish to emphasize that such an analysis of transnational history can capture the multidirectional forces at play, forces that are not so easily identifiable as explicitly Japanese or Korean and have therefore often been excluded from nation-centered histories.

Further, double translation is grounded in the potential of comparison based on different formations of coloniality. Double translation emerges from the colonial experience of being an individual (inscribed in the histories of the Western and Japanese imperialism) who was classified by the imperial-national gazes (the European imperial frame and the ideology of Japanization from the turn of the twentieth century). Thus, the problem of identity and of identity politics is a consequence of different imperial knowledges and imperial formations making the colonized as the other. In the process of imperial formations, Ann Stoler stresses that imperial agents utilized ideas and strategies from earlier or other polities. And yet comparison cannot be reduced to the space in which different imperial formations mirror each other in their operations. As Natalie Melas points out, it would follow a temporal schome of evolution and progress unified the comprehensive filed of positivist comparism that came out in the nineteenth century if we limit comparison as a base for relativistic discourse and particularism. Rather, the space that we need to interrogate comparison must be expansive enough not just to question “What do you compare?” but “On what grounds do you compare?” Sajin as cultural agency in Korea, which came from different metropoles, shows that the dual processes of translation are situated, constituted, and instituted locally. However, this does not mean that translation is accidental in the context of Western and Japanese imperialism but is a historical consequence of the coloniality. Comparison between the metropole and the colony, therefore, is about relationality, not relativism. If double translation is inherent in the potential for comparison, then we could think against the meaning of comparison simply as a juxtaposition of two categories arrayed to list their differences and similarities. We can replace it instead with a reconceptualized comparison that recognizes relations that involve more than two terms and multi-directionality.

If we confine the concept of translation as a transnational transfer of signification between two national or ethnic languages, we cannot unfold the complex directions of translation of sajin in Korea in which coloniality was interwoven by superposing European and Japanese hegemony within its geopolitical statues of the late nineteenth century. Colonial difference based upon geopolitics is mired in what I call double translation: the representation of the multi-directionality of translation that establishes a diverse space and thereby reveals the limit of what can be expressed in one medium or singular directionality. However, double translation can take place not only between more than two national languages and imperial formations, but also within colonial experiences emerging from thinking and rethinking coloniality and modernity in critical relations to comparison, which demands our new imagination on geopolitics.