PHOTOGRAPHY: Magnum Contact SheetsEdited by Kristen Lubben Thames & Hudson, 508pp. £95
‘PULLING A GOOD picture out of a contact sheet is like going down to the cellar and bringing back a good bottle to share,” wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the Magnum Photos co-operative.
Before digital photography, the contact sheet – a direct photographic print of a series of negatives, most often a grid of 36 tiny images corresponding to a 36-exposure roll – was often the photographer’s first glimpse of what had been captured on film. It facilitated editing and acted as a full record of the assignment, showing the duds, the almost-but-not-quites and the one or two standout images. The latter would be marked and the negative number noted; then they were enlarged for publication.
Magnum Contact Sheets, edited by Kristen Lubben, is a worthy homage to this humble yet practical working tool. It contains 139 contact sheets relating to some of the most iconic images and historical moments of the past 80 years, all of them made by some of the world's best-known photojournalists. The contacts' standout images are also reproduced, along with background details from notebooks and magazine spreads that the images appeared in.
Starting with work by Cartier-Bresson and his fellow founders David “Chim” Seymour and Robert Capa, and concluding with some of its latest generation, such as Jonas Bendiksen and Alessandra Sanguinetti, the book’s chronology corresponds with the rise of the visual press over the 20th century and parallels the changes in photographic technology from 35mm cameras through to video technology.
Magnum Contact Sheetsgives a fascinating insight into the process of creating great photojournalism. The contact's grid of images functions as a behind-the-scenes storyboard. It allows you to trace the narrative of the assignment, sense the anticipation of the photo as it is about to be made, then relish the final image that jumps out from the rest and tells the story.
The book is large, at 508 pages, but intimate. It gives the reader access to a special relationship. Because the contact is not the finished product but something that was to be consulted privately, there is a thrill from observing it. This intimacy is reinforced by the fact that you have to get close to the book to examine the detail in the tiny images that make up the contact. (Contacts were examined traditionally with the help of a specialised magnifying glass, known as a loupe.)
Great photography doesn’t just happen in an instant. It results from engagement with the subject, changing perspective, engaging further, moving again, waiting, noticing the light change and then maybe getting lucky with an expression or an interaction.
René Burri’s iconic portrait of a cigar-smoking Che Guevara, made in Havana in January 1963, is probably the only strong photo from three contact sheets showing a filmic and tight approach to the subject, who looks tense and distracted in many of the photos. Burri writes: “He never once looked at me . . . I was moving all around him, and there isn’t a single photograph in which he appears looking at the camera.”
On September 11th, 2001, Thomas Hoepker photographed young people relaxing by the East River in Brooklyn during their lunch break while a huge plume of smoke rose over Manhattan after the attack on the World Trade Center.
The contacts of Gilles Peress from Bloody Sunday in Derry, in January 1972, trace the beginning of the civil-rights march that day, starting with photos of banners and smiling protestors through to photos of gunned-down victims of the shootings lying in pools of blood on the streets a few hours later. “I ran down Chamberlain Street to the end. I got to the end and saw a body in Rossville Square – there was a priest waving a handkerchief . . .”
Bryan O’Brien is Deputy Picture Editor of
The Irish Times
. bryanobrien.com
