"Magnum Contact Sheets" ~ A Landmark New Book

Written by Victor Kellerman Tuesday, 15 November 2011 00:13

LONDON.- This landmark book presents an unparalleled wealth of unpublished material, revealing the story behind many iconic and historical images of modern times taken by the world’s most celebrated photographers.The book shows their creative process and also acts, in the words of Martin Parr, as an ‘epitaph to the contact sheet’ as it marks the end of the film era and the move to digital photography. The images featured – both celebrated icons of photography and lesser-known surprises – encompass over seventy years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the Paris riots of 1968 by Bruno Barbey and war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s iconic portrait of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X. Further insight into each contact sheet is provided by texts written by the photographers themselves or by experts chosen by members’ estates. A sumptuous new book, Magnum Contact Sheets, edited by Kristen Lubben, is a glorious monument to a way of working that is no more.

Often compared to an artist’s sketchbook, the contact sheet, a direct print of a roll or sequence of negatives, is the photographer’s first look at what he or she captured on film, and provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into their working process. It gives a behind-the-scenes sense of walking alongside the photographer and seeing through their eyes. Magnum Contact Sheets includes 139 contact sheets together with the accompanying final image, representing 69 photographers, as well as zoom-in details, selected photographs, press cards, notebooks and spreads from contemporary publications, including Life magazine and Picture Post.

Many acknowledged greats of photography are included in Magnum Contact Sheets: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Inge Morath, as well as Magnum’s latest generation, such as Jonas Bendiksen,Alessandra Sanguinetti and Alec Soth.

Kristen Lubben is Associate Curator of the International Center of Photography, New York.Among her previous books are Susan Meiselas: In History and Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, both published by Steidl.


We tend to think of historical change as a gradual, smooth process, a steadily rising or dipping graph, but more often it comes with such abruptness and completeness that we hardly notice that something has happened.

The revolution in computer technology over the past 20 years has left many of us, especially of the older generation, baffled and dizzy. For decades we pounded away at typewriters, our fingers blackened from carbon paper — remember carbon paper? — our shoulders aching from the strain of long hours hunched over those surly and resistant keys. Now we swear at our laptop screens if they dare to hesitate for half a second before registering our commands. Yet the suspicion persists that what we have gained in speed and ease cannot compensate for what has been lost. Each new technological advance seems to put us at one more remove from direct contact with quotidian reality.

Since the invention of the film roll, all photographers worked with the contact sheet, a direct print on paper from a series of negatives. The contact sheet was the photographer’s primary working tool after the camera itself. It was not only a manifestation of a particular sequence of pictures, but also a way of returning to the moment of shooting – Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “decisive moment” – a kind of retracing of the photographer’s steps in stalking an event, in fixing a fragment of time, in capturing an unforgettable image. Now, with the invention of digital cameras, that process is virtually finished, as only a handful of photographers still use film.
And only now that it is gone do we come to a sudden realization of what a radical and strange, indeed uncanny, process it was. In the early days of photography the image was made direct on to paper or metal plates, and later, negatives were actual size and did not require enlarging. With the invention of flexible film, and the growing availability and popularity of smaller, lighter and more portable cameras at the turn of the 20th century, photography became a much faster and more agile medium. However, the images produced by the new cameras were small and hard to assess with the unaided eye, so that negatives had to be examined by means of a loupe, a specially devised magnifying device. Enlargers using natural light were unsatisfactory, and could not produce the sharp quality sought by professional photographers. In 1914, Kodak marketed the first artificial light enlarger, paving the way for, among other things, the development of photojournalism.

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