Magnum Contact Sheets

Product Information

I would have selected the first one myself, but the photographer is right, I'd never considered that the moment of something about to happen is more powerful than the event taking place. You'll flip the pages and read the details and you will "get it" and be happy you digested this brick of a book. Any photographer, whether you're new or a veteran, should have magnum contact sheets on their bookshelf.

I also enjoy working on collaborative projects, alternative processes, and developing and printing in my makeshift home darkroom. Newly re-formatted and with 16 extra pages, this publication features superb reproductions of more than 130 contact sheets and over 200 photographs taken from the sheets, bearing witness to the creative methods, strategies and editing processes used by many of the acknowledged greats of photography. Every once in a while a book comes along that makes you stop, look and listen, Magnum Contact Sheets is such a book . The entry for Patrick Zachmann in 1990 in which his roll of just 11 shots shows the moments leading up to him being shot by a white policeman.I'm an amateur photographer who likes making images with pinhole cameras, smartphones and everything in between. No longer an active working tool for most photographers, the contact sheet is relegated to the archive, of interest as a historic document. I’ve mentioned before how, for me, the photographers’ reflections add immeasurably to the value of book.

Its value there may yet prove even greater than its original workaday function; an enduringly accessible record of what and how photographers saw for nearly a century.I also think that there is a clear distinction between photojournalism (which the majority of the examples in this book are) and personal images. Looking at the contact sheets made me feel like I was walking with the photographer as they shot the subject.