Magnum Contact Sheets

Product Information

The contact sheets are mostly from black and white negatives like the one shown below, but we also get some colour negatives (like Jonas Bendiksen’s magic-realist Satellites) and transparencies (like Stuart Franklin’s iconic images of Tiananmen Square). I assumed he drew them with his contacts sheets as reference, but that’s not the case: “I sketch as soon as possible after taking a shot, usually at the scene itself. I think I have got more out of these reflections, and from careful perusal of the contact sheets, than I have from many technical books about photography.

If the photographer is self-critical, he can attempt to analyze the reasons for the gap between expectation and actuality … Ruthless examination of the contact sheet, whether one’s own or another’s, is one of the best teaching methods. I may not be watching the photographer actually taking the photographs but, where a photograph can lie, I would argue that a contact sheet does not. This is why I don’t enjoy using point and shoot film cameras and why I love scrolling back on my phone to pictures of my children as tiny babies.Each entry also contains a short note written by the photographer (or in case of photographers who are deceased, by an expert) about the photograph. During Covid lockdown I have been scanning my old negatives dating from the mid 1960's and at that time I filed negatives along with a contact sheet to aid future printing. I’m going to jump forward to 1964 and an entry by David Hurn in which he was photographing the Beatles. Magnum Contact Sheets presents the work of 69 photographers – 139 contact sheets featuring some of the most famous photographs in history, along with enlargements of individual photographs.

In this way, my ‘channel-surfing’ approach finds unexpected and unintended connections and contradictions.His form is mirrored by his shadow on the ground – and also mirrored, elsewhere in the book, in Susan Meiselas’ portrait of Lena, from her Carnival Strippers series (again, link has some nudity). an amazing time capsule of photographic thought: a compelling journey through the picture-taking process. Of course that could change, these things tend to evolve with time but in this moment, this is how I feel.