Essay
Waiting for Light on Cobblestones
等一束落在石板上的光
I got to Baščaršija a little after six, when the shopkeepers are still hosing down the pavement and the only people awake are the bakers and me. I bought a coffee I did not want and sat on the step of a closed bookshop. The light comes in from the east over the minarets and takes a long time to reach the ground.
There is no trick to it. You stand, you wait, you look at the same forty metres of stone until you could draw it from memory. Around nine the tourists arrive and the cobbles stop being a surface and start being an obstacle course. Between nine and four I mostly just watch.
Six Hours, Two Minutes
What I wait for is the angle that comes in late afternoon for maybe two minutes, when the stones go from grey to something warmer and every edge has a line under it. It happens fast and then it is gone. Twice a week I catch it. Four times I don't.
The light doesn't arrive. It decides.
Tuesday it decided. An old man came down the street with a paper bag of bread under his arm, walking the way people walk when they have done the same walk for thirty years. He crossed the warm strip of stone and I took three frames. He never looked up. I did not ask, and I have not decided yet whether that was wrong.
I looked at them that night on my laptop, in a room with one lamp on. Two were nothing. The third had his shadow going the wrong way across the cobbles, which is the only reason it works. It is not a photograph of a man. It is a photograph of a man's shadow and a bag of bread.
The Rest of the Day
Afterwards I packed up and went to a lecture on nineteenth-century something, with dust on my shoes and my back aching from standing. I took notes for twenty minutes and then drew the shadow in the margin. Nobody in that room knew I had been gone since six in the morning.
I do not edit much. I crop, I straighten, I sometimes push the warmth a little. Most of what I bring home gets deleted within a week. My friends think that is discipline. It is mostly just that I can still remember what the street smelled like, and the ones that don't have it look like lies.
I keep the frames I can still smell.
Thursday I'll be back on the same step with the same bad coffee. That is the whole job, really. You find a place that is stronger than your ideas about it, and then you go there often enough that it stops performing for you and just happens.
中文译文
六点刚过我就到了巴什查尔希亚，店主们还在用水冲人行道，街上醒着的只有面包师和我。我买了一杯并不想喝的咖啡，坐在一家还没开门的书店台阶上。光从东边越过宣礼塔过来，要很久才落到地面。
没什么窍门。就是站着、等着，把同四十米石板看到能凭记忆画下来。九点以后游客上街，石板路就不再是路，而成了一场障碍赛。九点到四点之间，我基本只是在看。
六个小时，两分钟
我等的是傍晚那个角度，只持续两分钟左右，石板从灰变成偏暖的颜色，每一道边底下都压着一道影子。来得快，走得也快。一周我能碰上两次，剩下四次碰不上。
光不会如约而来。它自己决定来不来。
周二它决定来了。一位老人胳膊下夹着一纸袋面包从街上下来，走路的姿势是一个人把同一条路走了三十年才会有的。他穿过那条暖色光带，我按了三张。他始终没有抬头。我没有上前问，到现在也没想清楚这样做是否不对。
那天晚上我在只开一盏台灯的房间里，用电脑看这三张。两张什么都不是。第三张里，他的影子朝反方向横过石板，这是它成立的唯一理由。这不是一张人的照片，是一个人的影子和一袋面包的照片。
当天剩下的时间
之后我收好相机去上课，讲的是十九世纪某个我记不清的东西。鞋上有灰，站久了后背发酸。我记了二十分钟笔记，然后在页边把那道影子画了下来。那间教室里没人知道我从早上六点起就不在了。
我修图很少。裁一下，摆正，偶尔把暖调推一点。带回家的东西大多一周内就删掉了。朋友说这叫自律。其实多半只是因为我还记得那条街的味道，而没有那种味道的照片看起来像谎话。
能让我想起气味的，我才留着。
周四我还会坐在同一个台阶上，喝同一杯难喝的咖啡。这活儿说到底就是这样：找到一个比你脑子里那些想法更结实的地方，然后去得足够勤，勤到它不再为你表演，只是发生。
