像男性作家那样自拍肖像

How to Pose Like a Man
像男性作家那样自拍肖像

THE cover my publisher chose for my new novel, “The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty,” was indeed very beautiful, but more feminine than I would have ideally liked. It was mostly white, but all the way at the top were the gorgeous chin and red lips of a young woman. Not wanting to be a “difficult author,” I decided not to ask my editor to find a new cover. (She had already been kind enough to change it once.) Instead, I decided to counteract the cover by other means, starting with my author photo.

出版商为我的新小说《美貌那该死的重要性》(The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty)选择的封面确实很美，但比我理想中希望的那样要显得女性化一些。它大部分覆盖着白色，但顶部是一个年轻女子漂亮的下巴和红色的双唇。我不想当一个“挑剔的作者”，因此决定不去要求编辑换个新封面。（她已经很好心地改过一次了。）相反，我决定通过其他方式来抵消这个封面带来的印象，就从我的作者肖像照开始。

Until the overly feminine book-jacket problem arose, I had intended to use as my author photo a very flattering snapshot that my boyfriend, Richard, took of me eight years ago on the street in Paris at 3 a.m. I’ve been using it as my Facebook avatar for a long time, and I had been looking forward to putting it to professional use.

在封面过于女性化的问题出现之前，我本来打算用男友理查德(Richard)八年前在凌晨3点的巴黎街道上为我拍摄的一张非常讨人喜欢的快照作为自己的作者照片。很长时间以来，我都把它用作Facebook账户的头像，也一直期待着把它用在工作中。

Now, changing plans, I made an appointment with the great author photographer Marion Ettlinger. On the phone, I told her I wanted to look stern, severe, strict ― possibly standing against a white wall, maybe wearing a black cloak or something. “Like a headmistress?” she asked. “Yes, exactly!” I said, thrilled that she understood.

现在，计划改变了，于是我预约了优秀的作家肖像照摄影师玛丽昂・埃特林格(Marion Ettlinger)。在电话里，我告诉她想让自己看上去严厉、严肃、严格――也许站在白色墙壁前面，说不定还穿着黑色斗篷什么的。 “就像一位女校长？”她问道。“是的，没错！”我说，很高兴她能理解。

Two days before the shoot, I flipped through a book of Ms. Ettlinger’s photos to get a sense of how authors typically dressed for their portraits. I made a startling discovery: The male and female authors posed differently. The men looked simpler, more straightforward. The women looked dreamy, often gazing off into the distance. Their limbs were sometimes entwined, like vines.

拍摄前两天，我翻阅了埃特林格女士的一本影集，想了解一下作家们拍摄肖像照时通常怎么打扮。我有了一个惊人的发现：男性和女性作家摆的姿势完全不同。男性看上去更简单、更直接。女性则看起来比较梦幻，常常凝视着远方。她们的肢体有时交叉在一起，像藤蔓一样。

I decided that I wanted to pose like a man. I also thought: No wonder books by women don’t get reviewed as often as those by men. Maybe it was the poses. I made a mental note to alert VIDA, the wonderful organization that tracks gender imbalance in the literary world with tallies that fill me with despair. Of course, I’m mostly kidding. I doubt that female author poses are to blame for the inequalities in how many books by men get reviewed in respectable publications versus books by women. But it couldn’t hurt to cover my bases and pose like a man anyway.

我决定要像男人一样摆姿势。我还想：难怪女作家的书籍没有得到同男作家的书籍一样多的评论。也许就是因为拍照姿势。我在心里说，要提醒一下VIDA。这是一家跟踪文坛性别失衡现象的出色组织，其中记录的数据使我万分绝望。当然，我主要是在开玩笑。我才不相信，女性撰写的书籍之所以在著名刊物上得不到与男性一样多的评论机会，罪魁祸首是女作家在肖像照里摆的姿势。但不管怎样，面面俱到、摆出像男人那样的姿势总没有什么害处。

When the day came for the photo shoot, Ms. Ettlinger welcomed me warmly into her vast and gorgeous studio, and made me feel loved. But when I enthusiastically told her that I now wanted to pose like a man, a faintly troubled expression flitted across her face. I hadn’t realized how much preparation she puts into her photo shoots. Her whole approach to the session had been based on the assumption that I would be posing like a woman.

拍摄照片的这一天到来时，埃特林格热烈欢迎我来到她宽敞雅致的工作室，让我感觉良好。然而，当我热情地告诉她，自己现在想摆像男性那样的姿势时，她的脸上掠过了一丝苦恼的表情。我没有意识到她为拍摄做了那么多的准备工作。她的整套拍摄方法都是基于我会像一个女人那样摆姿势的前提。

I mentioned that there was a photo of Jonathan Franzen that was really phenomenal. I couldn’t remember if she’d taken it. Using my iPhone, I showed it to her. She hadn’t taken it. Yes, it is very good, she said. My unspoken message to her was, please make me look vaguely like him.

我提到乔纳森・弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)有一张极为出色的照片，但不记得是不是她拍的。我用手中的iPhone向她展示了那张照片。并不是她拍的。的确，非常棒，她说。我的潜台词是，请把我拍得大致像他一样。

Ms. Ettlinger took out a copy of her book and asked me to show her other man-poses I might want to emulate. She put Post-it notes on the good ones. I was very touched by her considerateness. Then we tried to have me replicate the poses. Turns out many were not as simple and straightforward as they looked: How did Junot Díaz get his arm here when his leg was there? My most successful pose ended up being a combination of the Daniel Mendelsohn and the Jonathan Dee.

埃特林格拿出她的一本作品集，请我指出自己或许想要效仿的另外一些男性姿势。她在选好的姿势旁贴上便笺。这种体贴让我很感动。然后，我们开始尝试让我模仿这些姿势。结果我发现，许多姿势并不像看上去那么简单直接：朱诺特・迪亚兹(Junot Díaz)是如何把胳膊放在这里的同时却把腿摆在那里？事实证明，我最成功的姿势是丹尼尔・门德尔松(Daniel Mendelsohn)和乔纳森・迪伊(Jonathan Dee)的组合。

Midway through the session Ms. Ettlinger said, “You look like a member of a gang of female mountain warriors.” I took this as a compliment. A short while later, she interrupted her photo taking to broach a difficult topic. “Did you happen to see X’s most recent author photo?” she asked. (X being the name of a famous female author whose identity I will keep private.) I said I believed I had. “Didn’t you think it was a little too stern?” she said, gently. “Don’t you think sometimes an expression can be a little too tight, to the point that it almost looks angry?”

拍摄到一半时，埃特林格女士说，“你看起来就像一队山地女战士中的一员。”我把这个当作赞誉之词。过了一会儿，她中断了拍摄，提出了一个难以企口的话题。 “你有没有看到 X 的最新作者照片？”她问。 （X 是一位著名女作家，我会对她的身份保密）我说我觉得看到过。 “难道你不认为有点太严肃了？”她轻轻地说道。 “你不觉得有时候表情可能有点过于严肃，以至于看起来几乎就像生气吗？”

I nodded and explained what had happened to my expression. About 90 minutes into our shoot, I had forgotten to focus on the thought I wanted to hold in my mind during the session. I believe that one’s thoughts can influence one’s appearance, and so for the shoot I had not only brought a suede jacket and a new shirt (stark white, it could easily have been worn by a headmistress); I had also prepared something specific to think about. In my thought, a book reviewer was sitting in front of a pile of books, trying to decide which ones to review. Coming upon mine, the reviewer looked at the cover skeptically, about to fling it aside, then flipped to the author photo and became confused. How could a book with a cover that beautiful have an author photo that ugly (in a good way)? The reviewer decided, right then, that my book deserved attention.

我点点头，解释了我的表情到底是怎么回事。拍摄到约 90 分钟时，我已经忘了集中精神于我希望在拍摄期间在脑海保持的想法。我相信，一个人的思想可以影响一个人的外貌，所以对于此次拍摄我不仅带来了麂皮夹克和一件新衬衫（鲜明的白色，女校长通常穿的那种）；我还准备了一些要考虑的具体事情。在我的思绪中，书评家正坐在一摞书的前面，试着决定要评论哪本。到了我的书时，书评家用怀疑的目光看着封面，即将要扔到一边，然后翻到作者照片，觉得很困惑。怎么可能封面如此美丽的一本书会有那么丑陋的作者照片（不过还算是有品位）？书评家那时就决定，好吧，我的书还值得一看。

I admitted that the thought I was wearing had degenerated, without my realizing it, into a corrupted version of itself, focusing instead on the demoralizing statistics about female authors. This new thought must have given my features an angry look that had become impossible to ignore.

我承认我的这个想法最终在我没有意识到的情况下，退化成了对于女性作家那些令人泄气的统计数据的思考。这个新思绪一定给我带来了生气的表情，令人无法忽视。

Some people feel that a book speaks for itself, that in the end nothing but the text matters ― not the book jacket, not the genre the book is placed into, nothing. I respectfully disagree with this optimistic view. I don’t think books speak entirely for themselves. If they did, novels by women would not have been so continually overlooked.

有些人认为一本书的好坏是不言而喻的，最后重要的只有文字――而不是书的封面、书的种类，或任何其他东西。恕我难以认同这种乐观的看法。我不认为书完全可以说明自己的好坏。如果它们能，女性作者写的小说就不会被如此不断地忽视。

In a passage in her novel “The Blazing World,” Siri Hustvedt describes the Goldberg Study, a real experiment, first conducted in 1968, which found that female students evaluated an essay or a work of art more harshly when a female name was attached to it. The works were identical, but the students liked them better if they thought a man had created them. When the experiment was repeated 15 years later, this time with both female and male students, researchers found the same results.

在西丽・哈斯特维特(Siri Hustvedt)的小说《异彩世界》(The Blazing World)的一个章节中，这位女作者描述了戈德堡研究，这是一项首先在 1968 年进行的真实的实验，其中发现女学生评价与女性名字相关的文章或艺术作品时，会更苛刻。在作品相同的情况下， 如果女学生们认为是一名男性创作了它们，她们会更喜欢这些作品。当15年后重复此实验时，这一次由女性和男性学生共同参与，研究人员发现了同样的结果。

Ms. Hustvedt sums up this soul-crushing reality exquisitely: “All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof” stands a man.

哈斯特维特女士绝妙地总结了这个让人心碎的现实：“在所有知识和艺术领域，即使是笑话、讽刺和戏仿，当众人知道这些伟大作品或恶搞背后站着一个男人时，就会觉得它们更好一些”。

I believe that this unconscious prejudice against women, which is extremely strong in the literary world, is present in almost everyone, including in those of us who object to it the most vehemently. I know that I even detect it in myself, sometimes. That’s why I didn’t want to make things even more difficult for my novel by saddling it with a feminine cover or girlie author photo.

我相信这是对女性的无意识​​偏见，几乎存在于所有人身上，在文坛则是尤其强烈，包括我们中最反对它的一些人也有这个问题。我知道我有时甚至在自己身上也发现了这一点。这就是为什么我不想用女性化封面或带有女人味儿的作者照片，来将我的小说置于更困难的境地。

I eventually wiped away my rotted thought, which suited my face as poorly as bad lighting, and we resumed our session. When it was over, I could tell there was something Ms. Ettlinger wanted to tell me. Finally, she said, “The photos will be exactly what you asked for.” This was clearly a warning. I knew she thought the photos might not look “good” in the traditional sense. They wouldn’t be “pretty” or “beautiful.” She said that she would not normally produce photos like these for a woman ― she would find more graceful poses, search for more flattering angles. I told her that I understood and that I was grateful she’d been willing to honor my preference.

我终于抹除了自己的不良思绪，它就如糟糕的照明一样不适合我的脸。我们继续拍摄。当一切都结束时，我可以肯定埃特林格女士有什么想要对我说。最后，她说：“这些照片将完全符合你的要求。”这显然是一个警告。我知道她认为在传统意义上这些照片可能看起来不“好看”。它们不会是“漂亮”或“迷人”的。她说，她一般不会为女性拍摄这样的照片。她会寻找更优雅的姿态、更讨人喜欢的角度。我告诉她我理解这些，而且我很感谢她愿意按照我的偏好行事。

The portraits were, indeed, exactly what I had asked for. Using one as my author photo took some resolve. A friend told me her biggest concern was my hand, which I had deliberately folded into a fist. She said it looked huge in the foreground, as though I were about to punch someone. She said I should crop the photo so that the hand wouldn’t show.

这些肖像照片的确正是我所要求的。用一张作为我的作者照片还是需要下一些决心的。一个朋友告诉我，她最担心的是我的手，我故意握成一个拳头。她说这在前景中看起来非常大，好像我是要给别人一拳。她说我应该裁剪照片，把手隐藏起来。