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Bryan O’Brien: This will be the year I put order on the chaos of my photo archive

A single image might capture the essence of a story, but a contact sheet shows the context and sequence of events before and after the chosen image

My wife, Louise, and my daughter Evie not long after her birth in Holles Street hospital on December 21st, 2001, and then a few frames at home later that day. That day is a bit of a blur. I can't remember why I shot this on film as I was shooting on digital at the time but I’m really glad I did. It’s a special moment for the three of us. All photographs: Bryan O'Brien
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Bryan O'Brien
Sat Oct 05 2024 - 06:00

I’ve been a photographer for a long time and have a large amount of negatives, slides, prints in boxes and drawers, digital files on all sorts of discs and drives.

Every year, as evenings get shorter I commit to putting order on the chaos of what I ambitiously call my “photo archive”. At the back of my mind is an aspiration to show 40 years of work in some cohesive form; a book, an exhibition, whatever.

My efforts start well but by the time the central heating goes back on, usually early October, I’ve lost interest and before you know it, another year has gone by.

My mother was always a willing subject. On this occasion I borrowed a medium-format camera from a classmate and brought it home to Kerry for the weekend. It was a beast of a camera, a Pentax 67 that shot 6cm x 7cm negatives that yielded amazing quality. There are actually two contacts here, each with 10 frames. At the time I marked two images for enlargement, where she looks away from camera, but now that I see them again the shot of her combing her hair means a lot to me. Its something she did first thing in our kitchen every morning. All photographs: Bryan O’Brien
Using infrared film with red filters was all the rage when I was in college, and I thought it would be perfect to shoot my mate JP’s band The Switch early one morning in Dún Laoghaire. In my head I was Anton Corbijn shooting U2. The bottom half of the contact shows photos from walkabout in Phibsborough. I see a garda wearing an old-fashioned heavy coat and old old clockmaker shop that used to be on the corner of Dorset Street and Blessington Street. You might notice a piece of tape running from top to bottom. This was because I couldn’t afford 10in x 8in paper so would buy 5in x 7in and stick two sheets together
This is one of the few Irish Times-related contact sheets I have. It was part of an assignment shadowing then taoiseach Bertie Ahern over three days in May 2001. We were shooting transparency/slides at the time for The Irish Times Magazine. Access was controlled but I do remember Ahern's comfort and ease with the camera. I also remember constantly trying to keep up with or ahead of him as he raced around Government Buildings
A mish-mash of photos taken while a student at DCU in the 1980s. There’s a sort of portrait of my roommate James at the top, attempts at street photography on the quays including one half-decent picture of a young boy selling the Evening Press followed by snow scenes in Albert College Park in Glasnevin. I remember printing and framing No 26 for my girlfriend at the time. Its probably in landfill now
In December 1985 one of my lecturers, Dr Desmond Bell, brought a few of us to Derry to photograph and film the traditional burning of the Lundy effigy. This happens during the annual commemorations by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry, who celebrate the shutting of the city gates in 1688 against the army of Catholic King James. Robert Lundy, the city’s governor at the time, is reviled by loyalists. This is the first of three rolls of film I shot that day and was my debut as a news photographer. I was subsequently thrilled when a set of my photographs was published in New Society magazine, to accompany a piece by Des
I bought an old film camera a few years back, and this was a kind of test roll to help me get the hang of it. The setting is my in-laws’ garden in Wexford and a tree that grows there. I've always liked the exotic shape of it. It is exotic and simple at the same time and seems wonderfully incongruous for the setting

I’ve trying again this year and am sharing this news with the hope that friends and colleagues will guilt me into staying on the wagon.

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Some envelopes of film negatives have a contact sheet attached. This print is made by laying negatives on a photosensitive paper, exposing it to light and the chemical process. The most common is a six-by-six reflecting the contents of a 36-exposure roll of film.

Most photographers of my generation who work in daily journalism have made very few contact sheets, even when shooting film. There simply wasn’t the time. When you shot film you processed the strip of negs, dried it and then held it up to the light or ran it through an enlarger, selecting the few frames to make prints from.

The image of the photographer sipping coffee while perusing a contact sheet with magnifying loupe looks great in movies but was a rarity for me in the era in which I worked. That said, I have made a number of contact sheets, many in college and some for personal projects where quick turnaround wasn’t an issue.

While a single image might capture the essence of a story, the contact sheet shows the context and sequence of events before and after the chosen image. It gives a sense of what the photographer was thinking when making the photos as you see them change location and so on. It shows the duds, the underexposed and the pit of focus, the imperfections. When you revisit them after many years you see details you missed first time round and make a different selection from back then.

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