一、「四眼兒」的時髦與暗室裡的照相黑科技
1974年上海那些趕時髦的年輕人，流行戴眼鏡兒。那時候戴眼鏡的人極少，被戲稱「四眼兒」。許多人根本不近視，也要弄一副平光鏡戴上，覺得斯文有學問。要知道不久前，知識分子還被稱為「臭老九」批判的。為了趕這個時髦，我也借了一副平光眼鏡，興沖沖地跑去照相館拍個照。
也是在1974年，照相館師傅在暗室裡捣鼓出了新花樣。一會兒是中間聚光的「白化照」，一會兒是用圓筒遮擋的「黑化照」。原本照片是正常的。「白化」「黑化」只是在印照片時做了手腳。這是大我兩歲的六哥，當年的「黑化」照。如今我們都成了老北京話裡說的「老皮咔哧眼兒」了，不過他年輕時還蠻帥的。
二、嘸沒準備好的驚鴻一瞥，與老攝影師的毒辣審美
到了1977年流行「大特寫」。8月20日那天我和幾個姑娘去拍。我拍了左右側面各一張，等著她們在鏡頭前這樣扭那樣擺，照相館的攝影師說話了：「像儂搿能介個（像你這樣的），勿用擺來擺去，照樣能拍出好照片來，」「來，我帮儂拍一張，不收儂鈔票」。我有些受寵若驚，坐下等他過來，幫我調整姿勢。他卻站在原地已經捏了橡皮球開關。「拍好了！」他說。我一下子懵了：「啊？我還嘸沒準備好唻！」
結果我得到了這樣，一張免費的普通照片。一直覺得這張照片土氣。可大半輩子過去，如今回過頭再看，才終於理解了攝影師當年的眼光和審美。這張照片兒裡沒有半點做作，全是那個年紀特有的質樸與天然。
三、1978年：雙影照的誘惑，與悄然登場的小劉海兒
到了1978年，照相館又推出了新花樣來「勾引」盲目愛美的小姑娘去花錢。把兩張不同姿態的照片，印在同一張畫面裡叫「雙影照」。將剪影投在牆上的叫「投影照」。
1978年街頭出現了燙了頭髮的時髦女郎。大波浪披肩，走路一顫一顫的令人羡慕。我不敢那麼招搖，却趕緊去燙了劉海兒，卷了辮梢。
四、火柴棒畫眉、閨蜜翻行頭，與那襲白紗裙的命運預言
那年夏天，我跟樓上發小毛頭一起去長風公園拍照。那時候女孩子哪懂化妝啊？聽人說火柴棍燒黑了能畫眉毛。這是我人生中的第一次化妝，而且只畫了眉毛。那年月經濟條件差，大家都沒有幾件像樣的衣服，與發小、閨蜜一起去拍照時，往往裙子、外套等會互相換著穿在身上拍照，這樣「行頭」就顯得多啦。年輕人喜歡「翻行頭」。
到了這年11月，聽說大自鳴鐘的天真照相館有借白紗裙拍照的。便與二樓倆發小興沖沖地趕去。2塊多錢借一套白紗裙，照片另外收費。當給我們戴上頭紗時，門口圍觀的一位老阿姨發話了：「喔喲，勿可以額！小姑娘嘸沒結婚勿可以戴頭紗額！現在戴了，下趟就嘸沒機會了！」當時根本不知道這是在拍婚紗照。倆發小聽了之後，乖乖地取下了頭紗。我卻沒在意。結果老阿姨的話一語成謔，後來我確實沒有拍過真正的婚紗照。那時花2塊多錢借衣服拍個照，聰明的多數人是捨不得的。當時大米才0.164元一斤。
五、別扭的蘭花指，與高科技美顏時代下的歷史真面目
到了1979年，照相館又出了「古裝照」「洋裝照」。衣服、項鏈、耳環和草帽，全都是花錢跟照相館租的。那個男攝影師托起我的手，教我翹起蘭花指，做了這麼個別扭的姿勢。我還讓店家給手工著了色，這便是我最早的彩照。
我和三嫂也去拍了一張才子佳人照。我扮成那個站着的才子。歷史就是那麼善於開玩笑，不久前帝王將相，才子佳人還是被嚴厲批判的對象呢。
我當時的審美一定有問題，去長風公園拍照那天，恨不得把草帽、陽傘、手絹兒、折扇一股腦全招呼上。那時候我們還沒墨鏡兒，要是有的話估計也得架在鼻樑上。這張照片裡我那兩條折起來的長辮子，其實是住在二樓的發小M剛剪下來不久的，也成了道具。當時我的頭髮沒有那麼長。
那時候女孩子雖然審美滑稽，但那些素顏照倒顯得質樸而自然。似乎只有文革時期的老照片，才陰錯陽差地保留了人們的真面目。在那之前的照片裡，人們幾乎都是精心捯飭過的。如今的照片就更分不出真假了，高科技美顏，能改頭換面的化妝術，估計照片中的人，自己都認不出自己了。
六、那場遲到的春光，與徹底卸下假面具的靈魂自由
這種盲目的趕時髦，說明人對美的嚮往是生來就有的。哪怕經歷了十年的批判，壓制與洗滌也從未真正被抹去。只要土壤稍微有點兒滋潤，這些曾被痛批的「資產階級情調」就會倔強地萌發出來。一切又似乎回歸到了十年前的樣子。那十年的歲月，真的就白白瞎折騰掉了嗎？還是說，正因為有了那十年的壓抑與空白，這遲到的春光才顯得如此迫不及待，又如此令人唏噓？
我這輩子也就是年輕時畫過幾次妝。比如與小姐妹一起拍照時，只抹個口紅，而且抹得太紅。在日本兩次參加萬聖節舞會時，畫過眼影抹了口紅。有一次在日本的家裡沒事兒幹，畫個濃妝自拍。取到照片回家看，好可怕！好在，後來在美國打藍領工不需要化妝，再後來成了白領，公司裡也不見誰化妝，尤其是軟件工程師。
網上有一句話挺逗的，喜歡化妝的人，沒化出不了門兒，好像是沒帶臉。不習慣化妝的人，化了出門，感覺像戴了假面具。化妝後臉上皮膚的感覺就是透不過氣來，哪怕是用了高檔化妝品。不用戴假面具，真的太好了。
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Darkroom Tricks, Trends, and a Free, Unprepared Photograph
Part I: The Trend of "Four-Eyes" and Darkroom Sorcery
In 1974, a curious trend swept through the stylish youth of Shanghai: wearing eyeglasses. In those years, people who actually wore glasses were exceedingly rare, often mockingly teased as "Four-Eyes" (四眼儿). Countless youths who possessed absolutely perfect vision would deliberately go out of their way to snag a pair of non-prescription, plain-glass spectacles just to look scholarly, cultured, and refined. It was quite ironic, considering that not long prior, intellectuals had been heavily criticized and branded with the derogatory title of the "Stinking Ninth" (臭老九). To catch this wave of fashion, I went along and borrowed a pair of plain-glass spectacles myself, rushing off excitedly to a photo studio to snap a portrait.
It was also in 1974 that the masters of the photography studios began concocting all sorts of new novelties inside their darkrooms. One moment it was the "vignette portrait" (白化照) where light was concentrated in the center, and the next it was the "shadow portrait" (黑化照) created by blocking the light with a cylinder. Originally, the negatives themselves were completely normal; the "vignette" and "shadow" effects were entirely the result of manual tricks performed during the print development process. This photograph here belongs to my sixth older brother, who is two years my senior—a classic example of the "shadow portrait" trend from those years. Today, both of us have transformed into what old Beijing slang calls Lao pi ka-chi yan-r—meaning we’ve grown old, with loose skin and blinking, weary eyes—but in his youth, he was actually quite a handsome fellow.
Part II: The Spontaneous Glimpse and the Studio Master’s Eye
By the time 1977 rolled around, the dominant trend shifted to the "extreme close-up" (大特写). On August 20 of that year, several girlfriends and I went to get our portraits taken. I had already snapped two side-profile shots—one from the left and one from the right—and was simply standing to the side, waiting for the other girls as they twisted this way and posed that way in front of the lens. Suddenly, the studio photographer spoke up: "Someone built like you doesn't need to twist and bend all over the place to get a good portrait. Come, let me take one for you, completely free of charge."
I felt a sudden wave of being deeply flattered. I sat down on the stool, waiting for him to step over and adjust my posture. Instead, he simply stood exactly where he was and squeezed the rubber shutter ball. "All done!" he announced. I was instantly thrown into a total daze: "What? But I wasn't even ready yet!"
As a direct result of that split-second squeeze, I ended up with this completely free, entirely ordinary photograph. For the better part of my life, I always looked at this portrait and thought it looked terribly rustic and unfashionable. Yet, now that more than half a lifetime has bled away, looking back at it today, I finally comprehend the photographer's vision and artistic aesthetic from all those decades ago. There isn't a single shred of affectation or forced posing in this image; it is entirely brimful of the raw, untouched simplicity and natural purity unique to that exact age.
Part III: 1978 — The Arrival of the Double Silhouette and Permed Bangs
By 1978, the photo studios rolled out yet another batch of new gimmicks to "entice" blindly beauty-loving young girls into spending their hard-earned money. Printing two entirely different poses together onto a single composition was dubbed the "double-image portrait" (双影照), while casting a crisp silhouette directly onto the wall behind the subject was called the "shadow-cast portrait" (投影照).
The year 1978 also marked the sudden appearance of ultra-fashionable young ladies with permed hair roaming the urban streets. Sporting shoulder-length, rolling waves that bounced with a beautiful, rhythmic tremor as they walked, they were the absolute envy of everyone who saw them. I didn't dare to be quite so flamboyantly conspicuous; instead, I hurriedly rushed out to get just my bangs permed into curls, while rolling the very tips of my twin braids into tight little waves.
Part IV: Burnt Matches, Swapped Skirts, and the Prophecy of the Bridal Veil
That summer, my childhood friend Maotou, who lived upstairs, and I went to Changfeng Park to take some photographs. In those days, how could young girls possibly comprehend the art of makeup? We simply followed what we had heard through the grapevine—that rubbing a burnt matchstick could color and draw eyebrows. That marked the absolute first time in my life I had ever worn makeup, and it consisted strictly of those drawn eyebrows. Because our economic conditions were so meager back then, nobody owned more than a handful of decent garments. Whenever we went out to snap photos with childhood friends or close girlfriends, we would constantly swap our skirts and coats with one another mid-shoot; that way, our collective "wardrobe" appeared infinitely more plentiful. Young people simply loved to "shuffle their wardrobe."
By November of that same year, word got around that the Tianzhen Photo Studio over by the Big Bell (Da Zi Ming Zhong) had white lace wedding gowns available for rent. Thrilled by the news, two girlfriends from the second floor and I rushed over eagerly. It cost a little over two yuan to rent a single white lace gown, with the photographs billed as an extra charge. The very instant the staff placed the bridal veil upon our heads, an old local lady who had gathered near the entrance to watch the commotion chimed in: "Oh, look at you, that's completely bad luck! A young girl who isn't married yet must never wear a bridal veil! If you wear it now, you’ll never get another chance in the future!" Back then, we were so utterly clueless that we didn't even comprehend that we were essentially posing for wedding portraits. Hearing her words, my two girlfriends timidly took their veils right off. I, however, didn't pay it a single shred of notice.
Yet, as fate would have it, the old lady’s words turned into a cruel prophecy—in the decades that followed, I truly never ended up wearing a real wedding gown or taking proper wedding portraits. Back then, spending over two yuan just to rent garments for a snapshot was a luxury that most smart, practical people simply couldn't justify. To put things into perspective, a single jin of rice cost a mere 0.164 yuan at the time.
Part V: Orchid Fingers and the True Face of an Era
By the time 1979 arrived, the photo studios rolled out yet another batch of options: "ancient costume portraits" and "Western-style dress portraits." The garments, necklaces, earrings, and straw hats were all available for hire from the studio for an extra fee. The male photographer gently tilted my hand upward, instructing me to curl my fingers into an "orchid gesture"—a posture that felt incredibly awkward and unnatural to me. I even paid the shop extra to have the final print hand-colored by their artisans; thus, it became the very earliest color photograph of my life.
My third sister-in-law and I also went to snap one of those classic "scholars and beauties" portraits together. I cross-dressed, playing the part of the refined male scholar standing to the side. History is truly magnificent at playing practical jokes: just a brief slice of time prior, depictions of emperors, generals, scholars, and beauties were still being ruthlessly criticized as counter-revolutionary targets.
My personal aesthetic taste back then must have had some serious flaws. On the day we went to Changfeng Park for that photoshoot, I couldn't resist piling on every single accessory I could lay my hands on—a straw hat, a parasol, a handkerchief, and a folding fan were all crammed into the frame simultaneously. We didn't have sunglasses back then; if we had, I suspect I would have hoisted those right onto the bridge of my nose too. Those two long, folded braids draping down my shoulders in that photograph actually belonged to M, my friend from the second floor. She had sheared them off shortly before, and they became a makeshift prop for our shoot; my own hair was nowhere near that long at the time.
Yet, even though the young girls of that era possessed a rather comical and ridiculous aesthetic, those makeup-free, bare-faced portraits still managed to radiate an undeniable sense of raw simplicity and natural purity. It seems that, through a bizarre twist of cosmic irony, only the old photographs captured during the Cultural Revolution era managed to flawlessly preserve the true, untouched faces of mankind. In the photographs taken before that era, people were almost always meticulously and artificially made up.
Nowadays, photographs blur the lines between reality and illusion even further. Between high-tech beauty filters and makeup techniques capable of completely altering one’s features, I suspect the people in these pictures can barely recognize themselves anymore.
Part VI: The Late Spring and the Freedom of a Bare Face
This blind pursuit of fashion serves as absolute proof that mankind’s yearning for beauty is entirely innate. Even after enduring a decade of intense criticism, suppression, and ideological washing, it was never truly erased. The very instant the social soil received even a tiny droplet of nourishment, these once-ruthlessly condemned "bourgeois sensibilities" stubbornly sprouted back to life. Everything seemed to seamlessly return to the way it had been a decade prior. Were those ten long years of life truly wasted on nothing but blind, empty turmoil? Or was it precisely because of that decade of suffocating suppression and total blankness that this long-overdue spring arrived with such desperate, breathless urgency, leaving behind such a bittersweet lament?
Over the course of my entire life, I have only ever worn makeup a handful of times during my youth. For instance, when taking photos with my girlfriends, I would apply nothing but a swipe of lipstick—and even then, I managed to paint it far too bright red. On two separate occasions while living in Japan, I wore eyeshadow and lipstick to participate in Halloween parties. There was another time when I had absolutely nothing to do at home in Japan, so I applied a thick, heavy layer of full makeup and took a self-portrait. When I picked up the developed prints and looked at them back at home, it looked absolutely terrifying! Fortunately, later on, my blue-collar labor jobs in the United States required absolutely no makeup at all. Even later, when I transitioned into a white-collar career, nobody in the company ever seemed to wear makeup either—especially among us software engineers.
There is a terribly witty saying trending on the internet: people who are accustomed to wearing makeup feel as though they cannot step out their front door without it, almost as if they forgot to bring their own face along; conversely, those who aren't used to makeup feel very much like they are wearing a stiff, artificial mask the moment they put it on to go outside. For me, the physical sensation of makeup on my facial skin is simply one of suffocation—unable to catch a breath, even when utilizing the most high-end, luxury cosmetics. To be completely free from ever having to wear a fake mask—it is truly, magnificently wonderful.
特別感謝 Gemini AI 提供充滿活力的翻譯和文本潤色。
Special thanks to Gemini AI for providing the spirited translation and text refinement.
第三百五十一篇
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