比尔·坎宁安：时装秀永远只在大街上

Bill Cunningham calls himself a street photographer, and in a way he is the innovator and prototype of that calling. Mr. Cunningham is modest and reserved, and street photographer doesn’t fully explain his practice. He isn’t a street photographer in the same sense as Elliott Erwitt or Gary Winogrand. He is not looking for extraordinary happenstance to make a remarkable picture; he is on the street to document the passing parade of fashion where it really lives — and as the public wears it, not as it is presented by editors, stylists and fashion photographers. As Mr. Cunningham has put it, “The fashion show has always just been on the street.”

比尔·坎宁安(Bill Cunningham)称自己是一位街拍摄影师，从某种意义上讲他是这个职业的创始人和原型。坎宁安谦逊内敛，街拍摄影师不能完全概括他所做的事。他不是艾略特·厄维特(Elliott Erwitt)或加里·温纳格兰德(Gary Winogrand)那样的街拍摄影师。他寻找的不是不同寻常的偶然事件，拍一张不同凡响的照片。他在街上记录流动的时装游行——时装真实存在的世界是大街上，是公众的穿着，不是编辑、造型师和时装摄影师展示的样子。就像坎宁安说的，“时装秀永远只在大街上。”

A Harvard dropout and Army veteran, he was a milliner and a fashion journalist before he began photographing passers-by on the streets in 1978. When he began working, centering himself on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, Mr. Cunningham was virtually alone in his quest. While he is certainly up-to-date on fashion’s industrial machinations, his real love is personal style and grass-roots glamour. Today, the work he has done for 35 years is imitated by dozens of itinerant bloggers around the world, none of whom has as acute an eye for style or as encyclopedic a knowledge of it.

他是哈佛的辍学生，是陆军退伍军人，1978年开始在街上拍摄行人之前，曾经当过女帽经销商和时装记者。刚起步时,他主要在第五大道和第57街拍摄，实际上当时追求这种事业的只有他一个人。他当然了解时装业最新的潮流，但是他真正喜欢的是个人风格和草根魅力。这项事业他一干就是35年，如今正被世界各地的数十个流动的博主效仿，但是他们对时尚的眼光不如他犀利，对时尚的知识也不如他渊博。

In 1968, 20 years after his arrival in New York and before he made his name chronicling fashion and society in pictures for The New York Times, Bill Cunningham began another fashion project, a body of work that became a 1978 book, “Facades,” and is the subject of a delightful yet subtly profound exhibition at the New-York Historical Society through June 15.

1968年，在比尔·坎宁安到纽约20年后，在他凭借为《纽约时报》用照片记录时装和社会成名之前，他开始了另一个时装项目，他为之投入的大量工作变成了1978年的一本书——《正面》(Facades)，也成为纽约历史协会举办的一场令人愉快同时具有微妙深意的展览的主题。该展览将持续到6月15日。

“Bill Cunningham: Facades” is the result of a long-term collaboration between Mr. Cunningham and his friend, fellow photographer and neighbor at Carnegie Hall Studios, Editta Sherman, who died last year at the age of 101. Like Mr. Cunningham, “the Duchess of Carnegie Hall” was a devoted collector of vintage clothes. On weekends, Mr. Cunningham photographed her on the streets of New York wearing ensembles put together from their collections. Each image matches clothing with architecture that exemplifies the period, ranging from the late 18th century to the 1950s. The exhibition features most of the 88 gelatin silver prints from the series, which Mr. Cunningham donated to the New-York Historical Society when the book was completed.

“比尔·坎宁安：正面”(Bill Cunningham: Facades)是坎宁安和埃迪塔·舍尔曼(Editta Sherman)长期合作的结果。舍尔曼也是一位摄影师，是坎宁安的朋友，也是他在卡内基音乐厅工作室的邻居，舍尔曼去年去世，享年101岁。和坎宁安一样，“卡内基音乐厅女公爵”也是古董服装的热心收藏者。周末，坎宁安经常拍摄舍尔曼穿着从他们收藏的服装中挑选出来组合到一起的服装走上纽约街头的照片。每张照片都把服装与代表那个时代的建筑结合起来——从18世纪末的到20世纪50年代的。坎宁安在完成那本书之后把这些照片捐给了纽约历史协会。这次展览展出了那个系列的88张明胶银盐感光照片的大半。

By presenting fashions in the context of New York City architecture, Mr. Cunningham traces the evolution of aesthetics from colonial times to the rise of Modernism. On the surface, “Facades” seems to be a lark. There’s something very light, even madcap, in this historical dress up, but behind it, there looms serious intention. “Facades” was begun not long after the demolition of Pennsylvania Station, the McKim, Mead & White masterpiece that still haunts the city’s memory. The obliteration of Penn Station was the most dramatic example of a process that has plagued New York from its earliest days, the destruction of the city’s greatest buildings — including the Garden at Madison Square, the Vanderbilt Mansions, the City Hall Post Office, Colonnade Row and the old Waldorf-Astoria hotel — driven by the irresistible force of property values. In 1965, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was founded to fight the loss of the city’s architectural heritage and one can’t help seeing the case for preservation in these photographs.

通过在纽约建筑物的背景中展示服装，坎宁安追踪了从殖民时代到现代主义崛起时期人们的审美变化。表面上看，《正面》似乎是一本嬉闹的书。这些复古装扮中有一些非常轻松、甚至离谱的东西，但是它背后隐约流露出严肃的用意。《正面》是在宾尼法尼亚车站被拆除不久后开始拍摄的，这个车站是麦金(McKim)、米德(Mead)和怀特(White)的杰作，一直萦绕在人们对这座城市的记忆里。宾夕法尼亚车站的拆除是从很早以前就开始困扰纽约的一个过程中最突出的例子：受到不可阻挡的房产价值的推动，这座城市最伟大的一些建筑被拆除，包括麦迪逊广场的花园，范德比尔特宅邸，市政厅邮局，柱廊行和老华尔道夫酒店。1965年，为了阻止这座城市的建筑遗产继续丢失，纽约地标保护委员会成立，人们在这些照片中肯定能看到保护的案例。

Ms. Sherman is a wonderful model for the clothes, adapting her hair, makeup and posture to each period with playful accuracy. She acts the part required by each ensemble and brings the spirit of the time to each, whether she’s in petticoats, bustle and bonnet or in a swinging ’60s mini. She fills the bill as a lavishly attired belle époque society matron, with great presence and attitude, but when the outfit required it, she could conjure up a Twiggy moment. In “Facades,” Mr. Cunningham shows that he is far more than a snapshot photographer. His compositions maximize the interplay between fashion and architecture. Ms. Sherman’s fur pillbox hat perfectly punctuates the daring shape of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. The fantastical bonnet of flowers and feathers she wears posing in front of Grand Central Terminal echoes the drama of Jules-Félix Coutan’s sculpture of Hercules, Minerva and Mercury atop the clock on the facade.

舍尔曼是这些衣服精彩的模特，她貌似玩闹却精确地根据每个时代调整自己的发型、妆容和姿势。她按照每套服装的要求扮演角色，给每套服装带来了那个时代的精神，不管她穿的是衬裙、裙撑和软帽，还是性开放的60年代的超短裙。她特别擅长扮演“一战”前美好时代装饰华丽的主妇，她的姿势和态度都很到位，但是如果服装需要，她也可以有自己的“崔姬”(Twiggy)一刻。在《正面》中，坎宁安表明他绝不只是个快照摄影师。他的作品充分展现了时装和建筑之间的相互作用。舍尔曼的长毛风雪帽完美地凸显了弗兰克·劳埃德·赖特(Frank Lloyd Wright)设计的古根海姆博物馆的大胆造型。她在中央车站前摆姿势时佩戴的极其漂亮的花朵羽毛软帽与正面钟楼上朱尔斯-费利克斯·库唐(Jules-Félix Coutan)的大力神、智慧女神和商业神的雕像交相辉映。

While many of Mr. Cunningham’s photos seem to transcend time, others toy with it. In otherwise pristine period portraits, the present intrudes now and then as an anachronism. An early 1970s taxi interlopes on the stylish ’20s Gothamite posed in front of the Racquet and Tennis Club built in 1918. And as the chic 1940s lady, Ms. Sherman, in fox furs, a camellia-adorned hat and white gloves stands in front of Isamu Noguchi’s “News” frieze at the entrance to the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, where a puzzled tourist from the 1970s looks on as if she’s just stumbled into a temporal vortex. The New-York Historical Society exhibition incorporates numerous charming notes that Mr. Cunningham inscribed with pencil on his prints in verso, such as this one from a surprisingly sexy shot of a translucent turn-of-the-19th-century gown in which the model’s body is silhouetted by the sun through the gauzy fabric: “The gowns were worn over pink body stockings or sheer slips. The custom of the French ladies to immerse themselves in a tub of water when fully dressed so the gown would stick to the body, caused an epidemic of influenza and many thousands of deaths that was called the ‘muslin disease.’ ”

坎宁安的很多照片似乎超越了时间，而其他一些照片则在玩弄时间。在原本纯朴的复古肖像中，偶尔会有当代的事物闯入，证明时代错误。一个时髦的20世纪20年代的纽约市民在1918年建成的球拍和网球俱乐部门前摆姿势，这时70年代早期的一辆出租车闯入了镜头。舍尔曼打扮成20世纪40年代的时髦女性，穿着狐裘大衣，戴着用山茶花装饰的帽子和白色手套，站在野口勇设计的洛克菲勒中心美联社大楼入口的“新闻”雕带前，一位70年代的迷惑的游客在旁边观看，好像她刚刚掉进了时间漩涡里。纽约历史协会的展览包括坎宁安用铅笔在照片反面写的很多有趣的笔记，比如一张令人意外的性感的照片背面的文字。照片上的模特穿着19世纪末的长袍，阳光透过半透明的面料显示出模特身体的轮廓：“长袍是穿在粉红色的紧身内衣或透明的衬裙外面的。法国女士们的传统是在穿好全套衣服后把自己浸泡在浴缸里，好让长袍贴在身上，导致了流行性感冒的爆发，成千上万人因此死亡，被称为‘棉布病’。”

The “Facades” project was completed 37 years ago, and it surveys almost two centuries of fashion and architecture, but the photographs appear as a breath of fresh air at a time when commerce dominates culture and fashion is almost a religion. Bill Cunningham is not an innocent, but he is a rare purist, and this body of work is a testament to his undiminished idealism. The Cunningham philosophy of fashion is remarkably egalitarian, and it is something that every contemporary participant in fashion should take to heart: “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.”

《正面》是在37年前完成的，它研究了将近两个世纪的服装和建筑，但是这些照片在当时让人耳目一新，因为当时商业主导文化和服装几乎是一种信仰。比尔·坎宁安也不是无辜的，但是他是罕见的纯粹主义者，这些作品证明了他未曾衰减的理想主义。坎宁安的服装哲学是强烈的平等主义，它是每个当代时装从业者应该铭记于心的：“时装是在日常生活的现实中生存下去的盔甲。我觉得你离不开它。就像你离不开文明一样。”