【TED】PS一张照片能振作人生，看年薪百万修图师的魔力！

Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City. We're pale, gray creatures. We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight. We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography.

2011年3月之前，我是摄影修片师，常驻纽约市。我们苍白无力、面如死灰。我们总呆在漆黑一片、不见天日的屋子里，工作室没有窗，主要是为了抵御阳光。我们帮苗条的模特变得更苗条，把完美的肌肤修缮得更无懈可击，把不可能的事变成了可能，我们一直被媒体批判，但是我们其实是才华横溢的艺术家，经验丰富，懂得欣赏图片和照片。

On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts. I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks.

2011年3月11日，正如全球其他人一样，我在家里看到日本上演的悲剧。不久之后，我参加做志愿者的一个组织“携手志愿者”团队马上就赶赴了现场，仅仅在几天之内，在当地开展应急救援活动。我和其他百余名志愿者都深知：我们不能在家干等着。因此我也决定加入他们的行列，做3周志愿救援活动。

On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave. The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland. As you can imagine, the town had been devastated.

5月13日，我来到日本大船渡县，那是日本岩手县的一个小渔村，人口大约只有5万人，是当时第一波受灾的地方。当时的海啸洪峰最高时刻高达逾24米，冲击到内陆足足有2英里的地方。你可以想象，这个小镇肯定备受摧残。

We pulled debris from canals and ditches. We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation. We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant. We got dirty, and we loved it.

我们拨开运河和水沟里的瓦砾，我们帮助学校和那些被埋没的房屋打扫、清理，以便重建、翻新。我们清理了大量的发臭、腐烂的鱼尸骨，那些鱼都是当地工厂里加工、处理的鱼。我们自己也变得又脏又臭，但是我们心里很舒坦。

For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things. They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards. And everyone was doing the same. They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping.

一连几周，所有的志愿者和当地居民一样，都找到了一些类似的东西。他们不断地发现照片、相册、相机和SD储存卡。每个人对此的反应和行动也如出一辙。他们把这些照片等东西收集起来，把它们送往各个镇里进行保管。

Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt. As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, absolutely everything they had, everything had to be left behind.

直至现在，我才意识到这些照片是这些人所遭受到的巨大的个人损失。当他们遭受海啸袭击之时，可想而知，必然四处奔波，寻求一线生机，自然把其他东西，他们的所有东西都抛诸脑后。

At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town. I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, the huge giant bathtubs. This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos. This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them.

我呆在日本的第一周的最后几天，我在帮该镇的一个疏散中心，帮助一个公社温泉清扫社里的巨大浴盆。刚好当地的疏散中心正在收集人们丢失的照片，人们把收集到的照片送到那个公社温泉，当时我十分有幸得到了他们的信任，让我开始清洗、还原那些照片。

Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened. As I looked through the photos, there were some were over a hundred years old, some still in the envelope from the processing lab, I couldn't help but think as a retoucher that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same.

那些时刻令人触动，也非常有激励意义，我一直听人们说：要有创意！直到那时清理那些照片，我才真的做到了所谓的“创新”。当我翻看那些照片时，有些甚至有逾百年的历史，有些仍被保存在加工实验室的信封里，我不禁从一个修图师的角度思考，或许我可以帮他们修复这些被撕破和被划痕的照片，而且我也认识很多会修图的人可以帮他们复原这些照片。

So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go. So we started retouching photos.

所以，当天傍晚，我就登陆脸谱网(Facebook) 问了一些修图师朋友，还没到第二天早上，就有很多很多回复消息，说他们乐意帮忙，我知道我们应该行动起来，于是我们就开始了修图行动。

This was the very first. Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic as having the photo damaged.

这是初次尝试（的一张照片）。还不算毁坏得太严重，但是被水浸没的地方导致照片中小女孩的脸掉色了，我们不得不精心修复，做到十分精确，否则，小女孩的脸看上去就不会像她原来的样子了——那多悲剧啊，就跟毁了照片一样。

Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries. Within two weeks, I had 150 people wanting to join in. Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada.

随着时间推移，越来越多需要修复的照片被运送过来，我们也需要更多修图师来帮忙处理这些照片，于是我又登陆脸谱网(Facebook)和职业链接网站(LinkedIn)寻求帮助，仅仅5天，就有80位修图师表示愿意来帮忙，他们来自12个不同的国家。两周内，我共得到150位志愿者的答复，他们表示愿意加入我们的行列。截至七月，仅在日本境内，我们就设立了多处分支，有的在就近的陸前高田市，有的分支北至茨城县。

Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos. The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, they could give it to us, have it scanned, uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded by a gaijin, a stranger, somewhere on the other side of the globe, and it'd start being fixed.

每周，我们都在临时照相馆里架起扫描设备，人们前来这些临时照相馆领回他们的照片。有时候，一些年长的女士从未见过扫描仪，待她们找到自己遗失的照片后，在十分钟内，她们可以把照片给我们进行扫描，然后上传至云端服务器，之后上传的照片可能会被一个非日本人、或陌生人下载，他们可能来自地球的另一端，那时照片就开始被修复。

The time it took, however, to get it back is a completely different story, and it depended obviously on the damage involved. It could take an hour. It could take weeks. It could take months. The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged. It was very time-consuming.

然而，那时，他们再要拿回这些照片所需花的时间就截然不同了，当然，这取决于受损程度，可能一小时就能修复好，也可能需要长达几周，甚至几个月。照片中美丽的和服必须通过手绘处理，或者一点一点拼接而成，再配上掉了的颜色，把那些没有被水冲坏的地方进行细节处理。整个过程非常费时。

Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, dry and reclaimed.

所有这些受海啸影响的照片，在盐水（咸咸的海水）里浸泡，受细菌侵蚀，又埋没在垃圾里，有时甚至被油污浸染，所有这些经过一段时间都会持续破坏这些照片，因此手工清洗照片是这个项目的一个重大组成部分。而如果这些照片不先清洗、干燥、认领完毕，我们也无法开展修复。

Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. We had an amazing local woman who guided us. It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone. You don't get a chance to mess it up.

我们的手工清洗活动非常顺利，当地有一位女士指导我们清洗，这些照片很容易再次受损，正如我的队长维恩曾说，这就像在对人进行纹身一样。你不能有任何闪失，否则结果将一团糟。

The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go. She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage. She also had duplicates. Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix, we could just put them together in one good photo, and remake the whole photo.

那位给我们这些照片的女士非常幸运，就这些照片而言，她也开始自己亲手清洗照片，直到她意识到她自己清洗其实对照片造成了更多损害。好在她有照片的备份，否则，照片里，她和她先生的脸部就无法完全修复了。我们也因此得以把所有部分整合到一张好的相片里，然后重新制作这张照片。

When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us. Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood, and they'd recognized him.

当她从我们这里接过照片的时候，她跟我们分享了一些照片背后的故事。她的这些照片其实是由她丈夫的同事在当地的消防部队的瓦砾下发现的，那个地方其实离她家很远，他们居然认出了他。

The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys were both at school, separate schools. One of them got caught up in the water. It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived.

海啸发生的当天，他正在负责确保海啸防御大门处于关闭状态。警报拉响的时候，他不得不冲向海啸最前线。她的两个儿子，虽然已经不小了，还在在两个不同的学校上学，其中一个孩子的学校被海啸冲击到了，她花了整整一周才找回失散的亲人，当时他们都死里逃生了。

The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday. For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed.

我们还给她复原照片的那天又恰好是她小儿子的14岁生日！对她来说，尽管悲催的灾难和种种艰辛，那些照片是给他儿子最好的礼物，这些照片让他可以重新翻阅，重拾记忆，那不再是三月的某一天给他留下的烙印，当他生活中的一切都发生了改变，或者说其实是被摧毁了。

After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly.

在日本呆了6个月以后，“携手志愿者”共有1,100名志愿者加入帮助日本救灾，其中几百名帮我们手工清洗超过13.5万张照片，其中的大部分——其中大部分最终回到了失主手里，这一点也异常重要。

Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched. During this time, we hadn't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, most of which was printer inks.

全球超过500名志愿者帮我们找回了90个家庭的数百张照片，这些照片全部被复原、修复。在这期间，我们没有为设备或材料花上千元美金，大部分是用打印机墨水完成的。

We take photos constantly. A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one. They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for. That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back.

我们时常拍照。照片是一个提醒和留念，提醒我们一些人、一些事，某个地方、某段感情、某个深爱的人。它们帮我们记录、保存回忆和我们的过去，照片是紧急时刻最容易被我们忽视的，但有时雨过天晴后我们第一个想找回来的东西。这就是这个项目的全部，为了恢复人性中的一点小碎片，挽回人们与过去的连接点。

When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it.

当这样一张照片重回它的主人身边，它将带来巨大的不同，为失主的生活带来很大的不一样。

The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin.

这个项目也为我们这些修图师带来了很大改变，对一些修图师，这段经历为他们建立了一些联系，联系到一些更宏大的事情，例如回馈社会，施展他们的才能，不仅仅用于苗条的模特，和拥有完美的肌肤的人。

I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months.

我想读给大家一封电子邮件作为结尾，我收到其中一封，来自辛迪，是六个月之后我从日本回家的那天。

"As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images. One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall.

“当我在修复那些照片的时候，我不禁想到其中的每个人以及照片中传递的那些故事。其中特别是一张，照了各个年龄阶段的女士，上至老奶奶，下至小女孩，围着一个小婴儿，这张照片颇为触动心弦，因为我家也有一张类似的照片，我的祖母、母亲和我，围着刚出生的女儿，这张照片挂在我家的墙上。

Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?" Thank you.

纵观全球，超越年龄界限，我们有一些最基本的需求亘古不变，不是吗？”谢谢各位！

来源：TED演讲

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