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Tennis, 36.6x65cm, Edition of 6, 2015, chromogenic colour print face-mounted on acrylic glass in artist’s frame
Night-Complete 24 Hours
Photography as a record of each aspect in our lives. Portraits, street, landscape and humanistic photography have been the subjects of outstanding photographers such as Ansel Adams, who developed the zone system to construct sophisticated black and white landscape photography, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured the simultaneous flash through the decisive moment. With the transformation of photographic technology, along with advertising and magazines, the era of color photography has gradually replaced the previous black and white photography. With William Eggleston’s Guide in 1976, the era of color photography was started.
However, due to the technical limitation, photographer’s concern about the night photography is still lacking in the 21st century. In fact, human is not only active in the day time, but move and work 24 hours whole day. In the past, black and white or color photography still focus on day time activities. To freeze the people’s action at night, we need to use flash light, which restricts the application in shooting, and hinders its universality.
Human activity continued at night in 21 century . Life is full of a variety of ambient light, such as sunbeam-like soft light or complex hard light. Such lighting environments have been familiar to human eyes, but still have a significant difference with flash lights. With technical revolution, photographers now have the opportunity to capture human activity more clearly by decisive moment at night. As a result, photographers can record human behavior for completely 24 hours, keeping the civilisation of photography still evolving.
– Yu Pu Pin
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Volleyball, 36.6x65cm, Edition of 6, 2015, chromogenic colour print face-mounted on acrylic glass in artist’s frame
夜晚-完整的24小時
攝影從發明的初始便開始紀錄了我們生活的各個層面。肖像、街頭、地景與人文攝影等都已經是過往年代每位攝影大師抓取的題材。安瑟 · 亞當斯(Ansel Adams)透過分區曝光法建構精密的黑白風景攝影，而亨利 · 卡蒂爾 · 布列松(Henri Cartier-Bresson)則是透過決定性瞬間抓取那轉瞬的靈光乍現，隨著攝影科技的轉變，伴隨著廣告與雜誌的流通，彩色徹底地扭轉了過去黑白攝影的想法，讓攝影正式走向所見即所得的時代，於是我們在1976年有了威廉 · 艾格思頓(William Eggleston)的Guide，開啓了彩色攝影的時代。
然而，攝影關注的事物卻因為科技與環境的侷限一直缺乏一個區塊。人類的活動時間不是僅有白天而已，尤其是進入全球化的21世紀，這24小時裡人們的生活方式，更是不斷的運作進行著。縱觀過去黑白紀實到持續演進的彩色攝影，仍舊將主軸放置在白天的人類活動裡，過去是因為技術性的問題，在黑夜中要清晰將人的動作定格，需要閃光燈才有可能得以實現，卻也侷限了拍攝的限制，削弱了紀實攝影的普遍性，實屬可惜。
當代人類的文明活動持續在黑夜裡竄動，生活裡充滿了各種環境光源，例如有近似日光的柔和光源，或複雜的都市硬光柵。這樣的光源環境都已經為人眼所熟悉，卻又與閃光燈所發出非自然光有著明顯區別。加上攝影科技日新月異，讓攝影師更有機會以更清晰手法對黑夜中的人類活動做出決定性瞬間的抓取。於是完整的24小時行為紀錄得以實現，讓攝影文明的時間進化軸線繼續進行。
-久方武
