Magnum Contact Sheets

they I want to talk about a book and a subject that are intertwined and I want to talk about contact sheets and contact sheets is a practice that I think in the digital age we've tended to get away from some what is photographers even a lot of film photographers who ultimately end up scanning their work for digital manipulation or distribution on social media etc contact sheets is something that you know you don't see as much of anymore they still are in practice but for those of you who were born before 1990 I want to share with you exactly what a contact sheet is what we're talking about essentially in the film days particularly with roll film shoot thirty five-millimeter or medium format you go out they shoot several rolls of film well there's no digital display to look out on the back or anything of that nature so typically the common practice has always been either to do these at the lab or do them yourself but to make what we call a contact print where literally we take a sheet of 8 by 10 paper and place the contact or place the negatives on top of that paper flatten them out with glass and expose them and we're not looking for burning you're dodging or the perfect print out of anything but what it gives you is a sheet of positives where you can judge and see what's on the roll of film to refer back to you can see the numbers that are embedded into the film so you know what the shot is and the typical practice was typically photographers would use like a grease pencil or something like that to make their selects and which ones they wanted to there's a wonderful book that I got recently that I want to share with you today that is a collection of the magnum contact prints this books been out a little while but it's still very easy to find and it's one that's been on my list for a long time and finally purchased it and I want to share this with you today because I think it is absolutely essential I'm going through here and it's really blowing my mind of you know it's such a simple thing to do to make a contact sheet and this is before we had computers and I know Lightroom essentially gives you your images in a contact sheet like form but when you have an actual object that can be traded around and marked on and reviewed in a certain way it's just a very different deal and the other thing that's really interesting to me is the way Magnum has produced this book and shown it to us is a lot of these are really historical documents of certain things that went on so you know in modern age we probably remember an event from a specific photo you know even Kodak used to use the phrase a picture's worth a thousand and that's how we associate these but then when you go back and look at the outtakes and you see what else happened there just such an interesting record of historical documentation anyway I'm talking a lot so without further ado let's head over to the the book stand here and let's check out the Magnum Photos book so we're going to look at the magnum contact sheets book and one of the things you're going to notice immediately is it's a very large book and the design of the book actually mirrors a box of of sheet film or printing paper in fact I think there was a limited edition set this at one point that did come in a box that had that same look to it but it's really cool and again this is uh you know Magnum photos it's photographers who work for the agency and their shots they're all displayed in here chronologically they start in 1930 and they go up into the 2000s I would love to sit here for hours and go through every one of them but I'm going to give you some highlights and I've picked photographers we've covered a lot on the show recently because you'll have some context of the images you're looking at in the context sheets that go with them first up is robert capa these are the famous d-day images and the significance of this is one this was the turning point in World War two capital was embedded with the troops that stormed the beaches of Normandy on what is now known as d-day and the story goes that the rolls of film were sent to England for processing to be published in Life Magazine which they were and this is all that remains they were severely damaged apparently by lab technician when they went into the dryer and you know you can see that there's some damage to the negatives in here and and anyway in this case you're probably familiar with all these if you're if you're familiar with the d-day set because there aren't very many but it's a very historical thing and I love seeing you know the negatives this was what was in capitis like us when he was on the beaches or he may have been using a context at that point but anyway very cool stuff I'm going to move along to something completely different this is Philippe Halsman and this is a very famous portrait that he did an environmental portrait I guess you could say of Salvador Dali and Salvador Dali obviously the well-known surrealist painter and in the final scene you have Dali floating in the air painting away with a chair in the air water flowing through the images in these cats and apparently what happened was they actually in the studio and you can see the progress of how this shot was made by looking at the contact sheets on this this was four by five film and these are just printed on a piece of paper here but dolly getting ready anyway they actually hurled the cats through the air so I is a big cat person myself I'm sure that there were some very unhappy cats not only being hurled through the air but also getting very wet anyway really cool shot and you know you think today a shot like this no with this surrealistic kind of style would be very easy to do in post-production and using digital manipulation and you know back in 1948 there was no Photoshop there were no computers and this was all done by hand which was pretty amazing another one that I find really cool I'm going to move up to 1966 this is Thomas Hawk nur and this is the famous portrait he did of Muhammad Ali and what I love about this and kind of what this speaks to me is then when you get into the contact sheets here and you can see where they used a grease pen to mark off ones that they thought were exceptional ones they wanted to use for something else you know these were all designed for publication coming from Magnum photos and I love these because there's a little bit of behind-the-scenes in here and you know when you think of this being a very very well-known famous portrait and when you talk about the equipment and the technology that went into it it wasn't very much it was a 35-millimeter camera loaded with Triax and it had these old kind of well they were not old at the time they were current but very antiquated lighting technology that we see now and I love that these tell behind-the-scenes story on this and I think this is another thing that you can claim from the days when we used contact sheets is because you know you could photograph other things in the scene and get a real context of time place what went into the shot Muhammad Ali the more of a human side and what all that up into the the famous image of the the fist coming at you which I think is a beautiful image next up is Joseph Koudelka and Koudelka somebody we've covered on the show fairly recently and this is the 1968 Russian troops invading the city of Prague which was really the only conflict that Koudelka ever photographed but it put him on the map and certainly made him very famous this is the famous shot of the wristwatch which I have since I found that episode done more research on it is not the photographer this is somebody else standing next to him but is the famous shot of the wristwatch indicating the time of the moments before Prague would be changed forever and you know you have these shots of the protests and the troops and you know this this major source of conflict and you have his his contact sheets he shot a lot over several days he used expired black-and-white cinema film for this that he had put into his camera any many cartridges for it so literally he would run back to his apartment get all the stuff crammed in the camera so every time he needed to reload he'd have to go do it manually back in the darkroom and come back out and you know his talking about what a time that wasn't all anyway again what you're seeing here on the context she's a very historically relevant set of images and for the most part you know you're going to see some exposures that kind of get a little too overexposed or underexposed but for the most part a lot of these guys were very good at what they did and you see that reflected considering they had no instant replay on the camera and and and in few cases actually carried a light meter they just shot another image that I really love 1968 we have not talked about this on the show but this is Dennis stock it was a New York photographer who was visiting Los Angeles and as the story goes he was near LAX and he noticed there was this spot where he could get up on a ridge and shoot down at the beach and maybe he could capture something was very California from there as he got up there he realized being at the airport that these giant shadows of airplanes were flying over the beach and he ended up creating a very minimalist picture here I'll show you the final of a couple there sitting on the beach on the bottom side down here and you do see a little oil drum trashcan over here at the top and the water behind it but what makes this shot it's the texture on the beach mixed with the shadow of the airplane very playful shot a little bit of a sense of humor involved beautiful composition with the airplane shadow being the prominent force here and then you know you have in a minimal composition when you have objects placed near the edges they draw your eye to them and they're placed you know so that you'll you'll you'll be drawn and they certainly are there but you can see from the context sheet it says in here used a 300 millimeter lens on here but since going down and shooting it you start seeing there's a couple of the the couple lying on the beach is a few pictures of that and then you start seeing the airplane where the idea came to him and so really there's four or five six shots of that seven and finding the right one and he was talking about how fast it would go by and how quickly this would happen and you know with the lens that long trying to get that to match up but it's really interesting to see just the process of something that was a very simple idea kind of done improvisationally that ended up being this this this great masterpiece and it was a really lovely lovely image another one and this is you know from you know again the talent of the photographer and the historic significance of the event this is Gio Perez who's a French photojournalist who happened to be in Derry North Ireland in January of 1972 filming a series of protests which are now historically known as Bloody Sunday so again right place at the right time and all of a sudden a photographer finds himself in the midst of a major event in world history very consistent on the exposures here and on the quality of shots again when you're shooting something this serious in this kind of life-changing and you know historic event you know you're going to have that by nature but you know I think that's another wonderful thing as these contact sheets are evident of as you can see as we go through here that you know sometimes what we're left with and what we know is being the definitive image that suggests an event such as this but when you're able to actually go through and look at the contact sheets I think from a historical perspective this starts to play in something else and what you're doing is you're seeing all the outtakes and it's not that we're looking at each image to criticize it or be critical you know I mean nobody's going to be perfect and take the perfect image every time these guys were very consistent but at the same time I mean it's a historical record in a historical document and if you consider the artist part of the photographer you know especially in street photography or photojournalism where historical documentation kinds of stuff like this you know seeing this process and seeing the photographer work I think is almost as artistic is the output sometimes to another one that's along those lines is Stuart Franklin's famous Tiananmen Square photos we're near Beijing martial law was enforced on a series of protesters and what became basically a massacre and the famous shot is this one with the tanks coming down the street with the label of defiance here that ran in the publication and Time magazine but what we're seeing here this was probably a simple ektachrome or Kodachrome as slides and we're seeing a contact sheet of the slides and some of the other images that are there as well and again I think this plays because there is a historical element here there is part of who we are as people that shows through in these images and another famous image of the the protests are blocking the tanks and you just you know amazing I again I think they speak for themselves largely because you know if you think of a picture being worth a thousand words and here I am trying to add more to them what's interesting is there's a lot more in here we get into the 80s and 90s and and Koudelka comes back in here at times diaper dongs in here there's a lot of wonderful photographers many of whom we've talked about on the show and many of whom I would like to talk about on the show that we just haven't gotten to yet and what's interesting to me too is Magnum when you consider it to be a basically a group of photographers it's a co-op they're owned by the photographers so there's the you know there's no boss in their ad agency that runs them and what they do is they supply the media with images of events and send photographers on assignments and you look through the history these easily even as we get up into the 90s and 2000's of how much of this is really done on thirty five millimeter film even today in fact the only example of digital film that's in here is as you get up into here Mikael Sabarsky of Cape Town South Africa where the screenshot was taken of expression media - which is software that's not really used as much these days but I think that this says something for the endurance and the timelessness of shooting with film whether it's medium format large format 35 millimeter is that we have these records in this documentation that's left over and this is something that you know and I don't want to be a Luddite about it but it's just changed in the digital world and we don't look at our images the same way sometimes we use a screen sometimes you know but we rarely print them or evaluate them as such and there's just something so beautiful and and when these become objects like what we're seeing with the Magnum book and the way these these negatives are shown in contact sheet form we're looking at the object that was the proof that was used for the publication was used by the photographer to decide which photos to use so anyway that is the Magnum book I will link this up in the show notes highly recommended it's easy to find it's not too expensive and I think this is essential for anyone's collection one thing I think this book has done for me is kind of reignited my appreciation and my passion for things like contact sheets and I know this is a really simple thing and it's really surprising even if you don't shoot film at all if you just shoot digital you know use Photoshop and make a contact sheet and print it out and use that to evaluate your work once in a while it's a very different process but I think getting it off of a computer screen where we consume so much information these days puts it in a different light of attention and a different attention span you know it's just an amazing thing that I think we've really stepped away from in the modern digital age and like I said earlier even film photographers myself included we tend to scan our work sometimes and look at it that way it's just very different to do a contact sheet and I think also importantly to you know I made the historical reference earlier and and mentioned that you know a lot of times if you know remember an event specifically from an iconic image that's associated with him to go back and see what else was on the roll of film you know I think another example I want to make is couple weeks ago when I was visiting with Harold Feinstein we were starting to do some of our interviews stuff his wife Judith brought down some contact sheets that he did of there's a gentleman smoking in a bar and I'm looking at Harold stuff Harold was so talented because you look through this contact sheet and there are probably about 10-12 useable prints that are amazing on this roll that would make great prints and he chose one that was he felt the best what's interesting is being able to look at these sometimes I guess there's an element of it that's you know I've equated before of looking through the under drawer of a photographer but there's something that shows you process at times in these that are really interesting for in his spork historical perspective and just it's somebody who's a fan of photography to be go in and see some of these outtakes for me what they do is they start to open the artist up and you realize that artists often are defined by you know certain moments of their career in certain works so there might be a photograph that an artist is associated with what's interesting to me is when you go in and dig a little deeper and you realize that part of the art that we make is not just the final piece but it is the process and when you can see that unfold sometimes by way of a contact sheet or something like that it really starts telling more of a story that you don't see otherwise and one of my favs is with digital photography and you know the fact that we really don't have solid ways of securely backing up data stuff will get lost I think it's better than it has been in several years but you know that's one thing about a contact sheet I mean sure physical destruction such as a fire or something like that would damage it but but they tend to stick around a little longer so anyway all this to say I hope you guys have enjoyed this if you like this video if you enjoyed it remember to like it and share it with your friends on social media and remember to head over to the art of photography TV it is about to go under a major overhaul and redesign and sign up for our email list so you can get updates when we got new shows and other photography related information so once again guys it's been another episode of the art of photography I'll see you guys in the next video later

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 77,062

Rating: 4.9676604 out of 5

Keywords: Magnum Photos (Business Operation), Photography (Visual Art Form), Photographer (Profession), Contact Sheets, Printing, How to, why, Contact Print

Id: rAQRZTRAM-E

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 03 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Contact Sheets is a wonderful book. If I had one complaint, it'd be that the physical book itself is so big and heavy - it's very, very difficult to read in any other position but sitting at a table with the book laid flat. Other than that, how can you complain? Magnum is home to 98% of the greatest photographers of all time, and MCS is a remarkably thorough look at the organization's incredible history.

[u/nrrfed]

Great video. I absolutely adore Ted's work and I can unequivocally say he's the main reason I'm the photographer I am today.

He's introduced to so many great photographers that have majorly defined my own style. I'd love to shake his hand one day.