2024年的中国当代摄影在技术加速与图像泛滥的时代背景下, 呈现出记录与生成并行、观念与现实交织的多重图景。摄影作为“记录”的艺术, 不仅是对现实表象的捕捉, 更是对社会结构、个体经验与文化记忆的观察与介入。与此同时, 随着人工智能、图像算法、装置媒介的持续渗透, 摄影也不断向“生成性语言”演化, 成为一个可触发、可重构的视觉系统。这种双重路径在艺术实践中并非对立。一方面, 一些艺术家依然坚守摄影作为记录社会与历史的工具的定位, 通过纪实性的影像与时间性介入, 构建民族生活档案, 记录个体与环境的情感缝隙, 唤起观众对关系、身份、观看本身的反思。而另一类艺术家则将摄影作为语言或装置的一部分, 融合影像生成、数字合成与空间建构, 探索图像的新生命结构。两种倾向共同构成了2024年中国摄影图景的“张力场”, 也提示着摄影的未来不在某种方向的排斥, 而在于多重路径的共振。

In 2024, Chinese contemporary photography exhibits a multifaceted landscape shaped by technological acceleration and the overwhelming abundance of images. As an art of “recording, ” photography not only captures the surface of reality but also engages with social structures, individual experiences, and cultural memory. At the same time, with the expanding infiltration of artificial intelligence, image algorithms, and installation-based media, photography is increasingly evolving into a “generative language”—a visual system that can be activated and reconstructed, and restructured. These dual trajectories are not mutually exclusive in artistic practice. On one hand, certain artists remain committed to photography as a means of documenting society and history; through documentary imagery and temporal engagement, they construct ethnographic archives, record the emotional fissures between individuals and their environments, and evoke reflections on relationships, identity, and the act of seeing itself. On the other hand, another group of artists employs photography as part of a linguistic or spatial apparatus, integrating image generation, digital synthesis, and spatial construction to explore new structural lives of the image. Together, these tendencies constitute a “field of tension” within the photographic landscape of 2024, indicating that the future of photography lies not in the exclusion of certain paths but in the resonance among multiple trajectories.