The Beauty of Film: A Reflection on Contact Sheets and Photography History

As I sit here reflecting on my own photography practice, I find myself drawn to the beauty of film and the tangible nature of contact sheets. The screenshot I'm looking at was taken from an expression media 2 software used by Mel Sabaski from Cape Town, South Africa. This image may seem simple, but it speaks volumes about the endurance and timelessness of shooting with film. Whether it's medium format, large format, or 35mm, these records left behind are a testament to the art of photography. In an era dominated by digital technology, I find myself appreciating the physicality of film and the way it can transport us back in time.

The Magnum book that recently caught my eye is a shining example of this appreciation. The contact sheets on display reveal the proof used for publication, showcasing the photographer's process and decision-making. Seeing these negatives in a new light has reignited my passion for photography and made me realize just how important it is to appreciate the process behind creating an image. One simple act – making a contact sheet – can put us back in touch with our roots and remind us of the attention span required for viewing images.

I must admit, I've often found myself stepping away from film to shoot digitally and relying on software like Photoshop to evaluate my work. However, when I recently printed out a contact sheet, something shifted within me. The tactile nature of holding the paper in my hands, the way the ink transferred onto the surface, was almost meditative. It forced me to slow down and engage with each image on a deeper level. This experience has made me more appreciative of the need to print and evaluate our work regularly – something that's all too often overlooked in today's digital age.

A historical reference comes to mind when I think about the power of contact sheets. Remembering an event or idea thanks to an iconic image can be a powerful tool for preservation and education. Harold Feinstein, whom I had the pleasure of visiting recently, brought down some of his famous contact sheets from back in the day. As I began to scan through them, I was struck by the sheer talent that existed within these underused prints. Each one told a story of its own – of experimentation, risk-taking, and ultimately, creative expression.

These contact sheets serve as more than just under-drawer relics; they offer a window into the mind of the artist. By examining the process behind their work, we gain insight into the creative decisions that shape our art. Sometimes, it's the lesser-known works that reveal the most about an artist's philosophy or style. This is where contact sheets come in – providing us with a chance to explore these hidden gems and reevaluate what defines an artist.

Lastly, I'd like to touch on the importance of secure data backup. While we've made significant strides in recent years, it's still a pressing concern for photographers. Contact sheets, while not immune to damage or destruction, have proven to be more resilient than digital files. Their physicality allows them to transcend time and technology, providing a tangible connection to our past work.

In conclusion, contact sheets offer us a unique opportunity to reconnect with the history of photography and appreciate the process behind creating an image. Whether you're a seasoned film photographer or simply a lover of the art, I encourage you to explore these underutilized works. You might be surprised by the stories they tell and the insights they provide into the creative world of photographers past and present.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I want to talk about uh 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 somewhat as photographers um even a lot of film photographers who ultimately end up scanning their work for digital manipulation or Distribution on social media Etc um contact sheets is something that you know you don't see as much of anymore um 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 uh particular with rooll film you shoot 35 mm or medium format you go out and you shoot several rolls of film well there's no uh digital display to look at on the back or anything of that nature so typically the common practice has always been uh 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 by10 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 or 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 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 uh there's a wonderful book that I got recently that I want to share with you today um that is a collection of the Magnum contact prints this book's 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 I finally purchased it and I want to share this with you today cuz I think it is absolutely essential um 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 um 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 a historical document of certain things that went on so you know in Modern Age we probably remember uh an event from a specific photo you know even Kodak used to use the phrase a pictures worth a thousand words and that's how we associate these but then when you go back and you look at the outakes and you see what else happened they're just such an interesting record of of historical documentation anyway I'm talking a lot so without further Ado uh let's head over to the the bookst 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 it and the design of the book actually mirrors um a box of of uh sheet film or printing paper in fact I think there was a limited edition set of 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 worked for the agency and their shots they're all displayed in here chronologically they start in 1930 and they go up into the 2000s um 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 uh first up is Robert Kappa these are the famous D-Day images and the significance of this uh is one this was the turning point in World War II uh Kappa was embedded with the troops that stormed the beaches in Normandy um on what is now known as D-Day and Story Goes that the roles of film were sent to England for processing to be published in Life Magazine which they were and and this is All That Remains they were severely damaged apparently by A 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 they aren't very many but it's a very historical thing and I love seeing you know the negatives this was what was in capus leas when he was on the beaches or he may have been using a context at that point but um anyway very cool stuff um I'm going to move along to something completely different this is Philipe hzman and this is a very famous portrait that he did an environmental portrait I guess you could say of Salvador Dolly and Salvador Dolly obviously the well-known surrealist painter and in the final scene you have uh Dolly floating in the air painting away with a chair in the air water flowing through the images and these cats and apparently what happened was they actually in the studio and you can see uh the progress of how this shot was made by looking at the contact sheets on this this was 4x5 film and uh these are just printed on a piece of paper here but uh Dolly getting ready anyway they actually hurled the cats through the air so I'm as 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 uh 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 hawner and uh 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 pin to mark off ones that they thought were exceptional uh ones they wanted to use for something else you know these were all designed for publication uh coming from Magnum photos and I 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 35mm camera loaded with Trix and it had these old kind of at the well they were not old at the time they were current uh but very Antiquated lighting technology that we see now and I love that these tell a behind the scenes story on this and I think this is another thing that you can glean 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 uh Muhammad Ali uh more of a human side um and what all led up into the the famous image of the the fist coming at you um which I think is is is a beautiful image um next up is Joseph kudelka and kudelka is somebody we've covered on the show Fairly recently uh this is the 1968 Uh Russian troops invading the city of Prague which uh was really the only conflict uh that kudela ever photographed but it put him on the map and certainly made him very famous um this is the famous shot of the wristwatch which I have since I filmed 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 uh he shot a lot over several days he used expired black and white Cinema film for this that he had put into his camera he didn't even any cartridges for it so literally he would run back to his apartment uh 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 dark room and come back out and you know his uh talking about what a time that was and all anyway again you what you're seeing here on the context she's a very historically uh relevant uh set of images and for the most part you know you're going to see some exposures that kind of get a little too OS exposed or underexposed but for the most part A lot of these guys were very good at what they did uh and you see that reflected uh considering they had no instant replay on the camera and and and in few cases actually carried a light meter they just shot um another image that I really love 1968 we have not talked about this on the show but this is Dennis stock uh it was a New York photographer who was visiting Los Angeles um 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 near 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 uh of a couple that are sitting on the beach on the bottom side down here and you do see a little oil drum trash can over here at the top and the water behind it but the what makes this shot is the texture on the beach mixed with the shadow of the airplane uh very playful shot a little bit of a sense of humor involved uh 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 um you know so that you'll you'll you'll be drawn and and they certainly are there but you can see from the context sheet uh it says in here he used a 300 mimet lens on here um but since going down and shooting it you you start seeing there's a couple of the of the the couple lying on the beach there's a few pictures of that and then you start seeing the airplane where the idea came to him and so really there's four 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 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 it was a very simple idea uh kind of done uh improvisationally um that ended up being this this this Great Masterpiece and uh was a really lovely lovely image uh another one and this is you know from you know again the talent of the photographer and the historic significance of the event um this is giio Perez who's a French photojournalist uh who happened to be in Derry North Ireland in January of 1972 uh filming a series of protests which are now historically known as Bloody Sunday so again uh 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 um very consistent on the exposures here and on the quality of shots uh again when you're shooting something this serious and this um kind of life-changing and you know historic event uh you know you're going to have that by nature but uh you know I think that's another wonderful thing is these contact sheets are evident of as you can see as we go through here um that you know sometimes what we're left with and what we know is being the definitive image um that suggests an event such as this uh but when you're able to actually go through and look at the context 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 and 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 as is the output sometimes too another one that's along those lines is Stuart Franklin's famous tan Square photos where near Beijing uh martial law was enforced on a series of protesters and what became uh basically a massacre and the famous shot was this one uh with the tanks coming down the street with the label of defiance here uh that ran in the publication in Time Magazine but what we're seeing here this was shot probably assum on ocome or Krome as slides and we're seeing a contact sheet of the slides and some of the other images that 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 is people that shows through in these images and uh another famous image of the the protester blocking the tanks and just you know amazing I again I I think these 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 uh what's interesting is there's a lot more in here and we get into the 80s and '90s and and kudela comes back in here at times uh de paron is 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 um and what's interesting to me too is Magnum uh when you consider it to be uh a basically a a a group of photographers it's a co-op they're owned by the photographers so there's there you know there's no uh boss in their Ad Agency that runs them and what they do is they Supply uh the media with images of events and send phot own assignments and you look through the history of these even even as we get up into the '90s and 2000s of how much of this is really done on 35mm film even today in fact the only example of digital film that's in here uh is as you get up into here uh Mel sabaski um of Cape Town South Africa where the screenshot was taken of uh of expression media 2 which is software that's not really used as much these days um 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 LTE 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 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 um that is the Magnum book I will link this up in the show notes highly recommended uh 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 uh 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 uh puts it in a different light of attention and a different attention span that I 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 uh myself included we tend to scan our work sometimes and look at it that way it's just very different to to do a contact sheet um and I think also importantly too 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 it and to go back and see what else was on the role of film uh you know I think another um example I want to make is a couple weeks ago when I was visiting with Harold Feinstein we were starting to do some of our interview stuff uh his wife Judith brought down uh some contact sheets that he did of there's a gentleman smoking in a bar and I'm looking at Harold's stuff Harold was so talented because you look through this context sheet and there are probably about 10 12 usable prints that are amazing on this role 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 um I guess there's an element of it that's you know I've equated it before of looking through the under drawer of a photographer uh but there's something that shows you process at times in these that are really interesting from a hisor 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 and 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 um 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 faves is with digital photography and you know the fact that we really don't have solid ways of of securely backing up data stuff will get lost um 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 uh but they tend to stick around a little longer so anyway all this to say I hope you guys have enjoyed this uh if you like this video If you enjoyed it remember to like it and share it with with your friends on social media and remember to head over to the artof photography. TV it is about to go under a major overhaul in redesign and sign up for our emailing list so you can get updates when we got new shows and other photography related information so once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video latertoday I want to talk about uh 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 somewhat as photographers um even a lot of film photographers who ultimately end up scanning their work for digital manipulation or Distribution on social media Etc um contact sheets is something that you know you don't see as much of anymore um 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 uh particular with rooll film you shoot 35 mm or medium format you go out and you shoot several rolls of film well there's no uh digital display to look at on the back or anything of that nature so typically the common practice has always been uh 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 by10 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 or 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 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 uh there's a wonderful book that I got recently that I want to share with you today um that is a collection of the Magnum contact prints this book's 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 I finally purchased it and I want to share this with you today cuz I think it is absolutely essential um 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 um 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 a historical document of certain things that went on so you know in Modern Age we probably remember uh an event from a specific photo you know even Kodak used to use the phrase a pictures worth a thousand words and that's how we associate these but then when you go back and you look at the outakes and you see what else happened they're just such an interesting record of of historical documentation anyway I'm talking a lot so without further Ado uh let's head over to the the bookst 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 it and the design of the book actually mirrors um a box of of uh sheet film or printing paper in fact I think there was a limited edition set of 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 worked for the agency and their shots they're all displayed in here chronologically they start in 1930 and they go up into the 2000s um 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 uh first up is Robert Kappa these are the famous D-Day images and the significance of this uh is one this was the turning point in World War II uh Kappa was embedded with the troops that stormed the beaches in Normandy um on what is now known as D-Day and Story Goes that the roles of film were sent to England for processing to be published in Life Magazine which they were and and this is All That Remains they were severely damaged apparently by A 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 they aren't very many but it's a very historical thing and I love seeing you know the negatives this was what was in capus leas when he was on the beaches or he may have been using a context at that point but um anyway very cool stuff um I'm going to move along to something completely different this is Philipe hzman and this is a very famous portrait that he did an environmental portrait I guess you could say of Salvador Dolly and Salvador Dolly obviously the well-known surrealist painter and in the final scene you have uh Dolly floating in the air painting away with a chair in the air water flowing through the images and these cats and apparently what happened was they actually in the studio and you can see uh the progress of how this shot was made by looking at the contact sheets on this this was 4x5 film and uh these are just printed on a piece of paper here but uh Dolly getting ready anyway they actually hurled the cats through the air so I'm as 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 uh 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 hawner and uh 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 pin to mark off ones that they thought were exceptional uh ones they wanted to use for something else you know these were all designed for publication uh coming from Magnum photos and I 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 35mm camera loaded with Trix and it had these old kind of at the well they were not old at the time they were current uh but very Antiquated lighting technology that we see now and I love that these tell a behind the scenes story on this and I think this is another thing that you can glean 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 uh Muhammad Ali uh more of a human side um and what all led up into the the famous image of the the fist coming at you um which I think is is is a beautiful image um next up is Joseph kudelka and kudelka is somebody we've covered on the show Fairly recently uh this is the 1968 Uh Russian troops invading the city of Prague which uh was really the only conflict uh that kudela ever photographed but it put him on the map and certainly made him very famous um this is the famous shot of the wristwatch which I have since I filmed 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 uh he shot a lot over several days he used expired black and white Cinema film for this that he had put into his camera he didn't even any cartridges for it so literally he would run back to his apartment uh 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 dark room and come back out and you know his uh talking about what a time that was and all anyway again you what you're seeing here on the context she's a very historically uh relevant uh set of images and for the most part you know you're going to see some exposures that kind of get a little too OS exposed or underexposed but for the most part A lot of these guys were very good at what they did uh and you see that reflected uh considering they had no instant replay on the camera and and and in few cases actually carried a light meter they just shot um another image that I really love 1968 we have not talked about this on the show but this is Dennis stock uh it was a New York photographer who was visiting Los Angeles um 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 near 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 uh of a couple that are sitting on the beach on the bottom side down here and you do see a little oil drum trash can over here at the top and the water behind it but the what makes this shot is the texture on the beach mixed with the shadow of the airplane uh very playful shot a little bit of a sense of humor involved uh 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 um you know so that you'll you'll you'll be drawn and and they certainly are there but you can see from the context sheet uh it says in here he used a 300 mimet lens on here um but since going down and shooting it you you start seeing there's a couple of the of the the couple lying on the beach there's a few pictures of that and then you start seeing the airplane where the idea came to him and so really there's four 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 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 it was a very simple idea uh kind of done uh improvisationally um that ended up being this this this Great Masterpiece and uh was a really lovely lovely image uh another one and this is you know from you know again the talent of the photographer and the historic significance of the event um this is giio Perez who's a French photojournalist uh who happened to be in Derry North Ireland in January of 1972 uh filming a series of protests which are now historically known as Bloody Sunday so again uh 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 um very consistent on the exposures here and on the quality of shots uh again when you're shooting something this serious and this um kind of life-changing and you know historic event uh you know you're going to have that by nature but uh you know I think that's another wonderful thing is these contact sheets are evident of as you can see as we go through here um that you know sometimes what we're left with and what we know is being the definitive image um that suggests an event such as this uh but when you're able to actually go through and look at the context 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 and 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 as is the output sometimes too another one that's along those lines is Stuart Franklin's famous tan Square photos where near Beijing uh martial law was enforced on a series of protesters and what became uh basically a massacre and the famous shot was this one uh with the tanks coming down the street with the label of defiance here uh that ran in the publication in Time Magazine but what we're seeing here this was shot probably assum on ocome or Krome as slides and we're seeing a contact sheet of the slides and some of the other images that 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 is people that shows through in these images and uh another famous image of the the protester blocking the tanks and just you know amazing I again I I think these 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 uh what's interesting is there's a lot more in here and we get into the 80s and '90s and and kudela comes back in here at times uh de paron is 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 um and what's interesting to me too is Magnum uh when you consider it to be uh a basically a a a group of photographers it's a co-op they're owned by the photographers so there's there you know there's no uh boss in their Ad Agency that runs them and what they do is they Supply uh the media with images of events and send phot own assignments and you look through the history of these even even as we get up into the '90s and 2000s of how much of this is really done on 35mm film even today in fact the only example of digital film that's in here uh is as you get up into here uh Mel sabaski um of Cape Town South Africa where the screenshot was taken of uh of expression media 2 which is software that's not really used as much these days um 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 LTE 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 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 um that is the Magnum book I will link this up in the show notes highly recommended uh 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 uh 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 uh puts it in a different light of attention and a different attention span that I 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 uh myself included we tend to scan our work sometimes and look at it that way it's just very different to to do a contact sheet um and I think also importantly too 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 it and to go back and see what else was on the role of film uh you know I think another um example I want to make is a couple weeks ago when I was visiting with Harold Feinstein we were starting to do some of our interview stuff uh his wife Judith brought down uh some contact sheets that he did of there's a gentleman smoking in a bar and I'm looking at Harold's stuff Harold was so talented because you look through this context sheet and there are probably about 10 12 usable prints that are amazing on this role 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 um I guess there's an element of it that's you know I've equated it before of looking through the under drawer of a photographer uh but there's something that shows you process at times in these that are really interesting from a hisor 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 and 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 um 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 faves is with digital photography and you know the fact that we really don't have solid ways of of securely backing up data stuff will get lost um 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 uh but they tend to stick around a little longer so anyway all this to say I hope you guys have enjoyed this uh if you like this video If you enjoyed it remember to like it and share it with with your friends on social media and remember to head over to the artof photography. TV it is about to go under a major overhaul in redesign and sign up for our emailing list so you can get updates when we got new shows and other photography related information so once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"