The Art & Ethics of Capturing History
What I’m Reading: Magnum Contact Sheets
A good read entertains and educates. The time I spend between the covers of any book needs to relax me and ease the stress of life. But it also needs to stimulate thought, reflection, and growth.
At first sight, Magnum Contact Sheets signals tough love: 524 pages, dimensions of a 13-inch laptop computer but twice the thickness, and a hefty weight of 2.8 Kg / 6.1 lbs.
Phew. A piece of work.
But even the softcover edition (all I could afford) is beautifully printed. The cover design intrigues me.
“Come, pick me up!” I can hear the book’s discreet whisper every time my eyes catch sight of it. The good time that awaits as a reward for donating my time to it lures me in.
In its essence, Contact Sheets is a learning tool. Through historical events, its readers learn about the arts and ethics of photography, journalism, and life.
Magnum is one of the big names in the world of photo agencies. Its rich history means one of their photographers has witnessed moments of history — big and small, loud and quiet, violent and peaceful.
In this book, edited by Kristen Lubben, you’ll revisit such moments. Photographers show you the power of photography and journalism, from Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1933 to Jim Goldberg in 2010.
While one way of reading Contact Sheets is as a history book, the photographic wisdom it shares is the real star.
The structure is simple and effective. Seven chapters that more or less group a decade of events. For each event, a photographer shares her or his observations, experiences, lessons learned, and the pictures that keep those events alive.
But it’s not necessarily a single picture that stands out. It’s the photographic process that does.
The contact sheet, a document that serves as a record of the sequence of events the photographer witnessed, is the tool of choice to stimulate readers’ thoughts on the art and ethics of photographing, editing, and reporting.
A contact sheet is a part of the photographic process that our digital times have almost entirely replaced. All of the assignments presented in Contact Sheets were captured on film. For those of you that are not aware, that’s how photography worked before digital cameras were around.
In one sentence, a contact sheet is a single sheet of paper that lists small previews of all the pictures taken on a single roll of film (about 36 frames in most cases).
A contact sheet is a photographic print that offers a preview of the entire roll of film. It plays an important role in editing.
A roll of film, after it’s been developed, gets cut into strips of 5–6 frames each. The strips are then placed accordingly to print on a single sheet of paper (think A 4 or letter-sized for an idea of what this looks like).
For more details, try this video. It’s a good guide if you want to see how a contact sheet is printed.
The benefits of a contact sheet are discussed throughout this book. They include the contact sheet as a record of one’s photographic approach and a tool that helps in editing.
Marc Riboud’s contact sheet of the 1987 trial against Klaus Barbie serves, as he puts it, as a time capsule that revives the experiences in the field while editing. Photographers and editors can discover missed moments.
It can be an educational tool to study photographic approaches, see sequences, how a photographer approached and worked a scene. You can see the mistakes, the changes. That’s a benefit for others if a chance presents itself to spend time with contact sheets from great photographers.
But it’s also a benefit that presents itself when a photographer studies her or his own contacts. Ferdinando Scianna, for example, describes contacts as “self-analysis” that helps to find the right path for one’s work.
It’s also an archival tool. The introduction to Contact Sheets explains how Magnum started to bring order to photographers’ archives. Instead of boxes of loose negatives and slides, the main Magnum offices offered a library with books of contacts for each photographer. I enjoy the thought of such an organizational approach.
Nowadays, digital workflows have all but displaced film, especially in journalism. One function of contact sheets that was already being explored when film was still the dominant photographic medium is still a viable option today. The contact sheet as a form of artistic expression.
Jim Goldberg’s 1989 project “Signing Off” uses the contact sheet to tell the story. He transformed it into a collage, a piece of art that includes previews of his pictures, pictures that are obscured, and text. There’s a sequence, a narrative. Quite interesting.
The contact sheet as a tool is a fascinating subject. It’s a topic that revives the allure of diving into a photographic world of the past, one that I only have a few childhood memories of.
And while I can see the benefits of contact sheets, I’m not sold on the superiority aspect you can read between the lines more than once. You can read about what we have lost with the transition to digital photography in many of the assignments presented.
And as much as you can show an intact roll, an unaltered roll that verifies the authentic sequence of events, it’s still a tool that allows omissions and rearrangements. And digital editing can show the sequence just as accurately and intact if your workflow is sound.
The Art & Ethics of Photographing
As with every part of this look at Magnum Contact Sheets, a book of such dimension holds so much writing material it’s impossible to touch on every aspect. I’ve decided to focus on four pieces of picture-making advice: seeing in scenes, working with empathy, the value of teamwork in visual storytelling, and covering history.
Discovering scenes and committing to them is a photographic approach one can see in many examples in Contact Sheets. Chim’s 1936 Woman in the Crowd is an early example that stands out.
His assignment brought David Seymour, Chim’s real name, to a gathering of peasants in rural Spain. The contact sheet shows how he explored vantage points and varied the types of pictures. He went high and showed the masses. Then, he was right amongst them and looked for individual faces. He tried to see and showed patience to bring the three elements of a successful picture together: light, composition, moment.
There are many more examples I could write about. But a final note on Elliott Erwitt’s “Bulldogs” from 2000 has to suffice.
His casual, humorous street picture of a man who appears to have the face of a dog demonstrates a photographic process I agree with.
He says, “it’s a lot of pictures getting to the good one.” I’ve also heard it referred to as shoot more, less often. Or simply put: pick a scene and stick with it. Fine-tune your composition, consider light, and be ready to capture the right moment. An approach that takes patience and thoughtfulness. And many frames. Frames that the contact sheet reveals afterward. A record of your process, your thoughts, your path to your final picture. Mistakes included.
Another element of making successful pictures is empathy. Raghu Rai’s pictures of Mother Teresa (1970) demonstrate a photographer who approaches the people he works with, with a great degree of empathy. His observations from working with her and the contact sheet show his careful approach. He was respectful, patient, gained her trust, and eventually the access he needed to capture portraits with emotional depth.
Cornell Capa’s coverage of the fall of the Argentine Perón regime in 1955 has tremendous value on many levels. I want to mention teamwork.
Journalism, especially photojournalism, is often seen as a solitary profession. Capa worked for weeks to document history in the making.
He photographed, recorded, as we would call it today, the essential metadata and other story-relevant information, and the editors at home processed and published. A team, working hand-in-hand.
Capa’s work is also a first example of the final point, covering history. The excitement of being in the middle of a historic event and preserving it for your audience shines through.
Magnum’s history bristles with historic events that their photographers covered. A treasure trove for history lessons and learning about making important pictures under pressure.
There’s Burt Glinn’s 1959 pictures of Castro coming to power. Stunning pictures of a revolution that unfolded in front of a journalist’s eyes.
René Burri’s 1963 portraits of Che Guevara during an interview. A masterclass in blending in, becoming a natural part of a scene, so people forget the camera’s presence. That’s the true meaning of the fly on the wall.
Paul Fusco captured stunning pictures of the Robert Kennedy funeral train in 1968.
In 1972, Gilles Peress documented Bloody Sunday. His pictures are a photographic inspiration and show the power of photography — they were important evidence in the legal aftermath of a violent clash between the military and protestors.
The Art & Ethics of Editing
Besides advice on the process of making pictures, Contact Sheets offers insights into the other side of photography — the editing process. The points I’ve selected are editing for a story and editing with ethical guidelines.
Raymond Depardon’s pictures of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 reveal contact sheets that speak to editing being about searching for the story, for a narrative that best fits the event, and the observations one has made while in the field.
The final picture shows a “punk from the West,” as Depardon describes the man he photographed sitting on top of the remains of the wall. It’s the screaming that grabbed his attention. There are quieter pictures of the scene and from others nearby. But the chosen picture includes that “cry of freedom” that “symbolized the fall of the wall.”
Mark Power’s work from Scarborough, England, is part of a larger project on Britain’s coast and shipping industries. Called “The Shipping Forecast,” Power captured more than 14,000 pictures for this project.
Editing, as one might assume, was a lengthy task. He managed to control that process by answering one question: what is the work about? Or what’s the story that I want to tell?
Paolo Pellegrin adds to that angle in his description of his 2003 work on Palestine. Making pictures is only half the work. The other half is editing. By editing, he refers to finding “a sense of narrative.”
In addition, he speaks to the art of editing — looking not only for the story but for a visual aspect, an aesthetic.
The final two examples I want to mention are from the work of Peter Marlow. Both are projects from 1981.
His portraits of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher demonstrate the ethical dimension of editing. His contact sheet reveals multiple options he could have chosen. Depending on the picture, we see a Prime Minister who is determined and stateswoman-like. Or one who is tired or angry or surprised. Some frames are flattering. Others not. They might look similar at first glance. But they change the story journalists tell.
When editing, one needs to think about what the event was like, which frame fits the story — the spirit of the moment — most.
There’s an ethical dimension to portray the people one photographs accurately and with empathy.
Journalistic pictures don’t have to look like hi-gloss fashion pictures, but they have to be fair and sound. It’s their empathy and emotionality that make them beautiful.
Marlow’s contact sheet from Derry, Northern Ireland (1981), includes another small nugget.
The picture of a “young Catholic boy,” who prepared to throw a petrol bomb around a corner, in the direction of waiting soldiers who couldn’t see he was there, made it into Life magazine.
But Marlow feels another picture from that scene “describes the energy and narrative of the event” better. It’s a small change only: the young man ducked a little further down, lurking a tiny bit further around the corner. The scene feels more active, more alive. I agree; a fascinating discussion on editing.
The Art & Ethics of Reporting
The reporting advice in Contact Sheets is vast. I chose four photographers to highlight the slippery slope of public relations vs. journalism, story focus, and in-the-field insights.
Eve Arnold’s pictures of Malcolm X (1961) include a curious backstory.
She realized eventually that Malcolm X used her for free PR opportunities. In other words, he knew what he wanted to get out of having a photographer around for many months, a clear idea of how the world should see him. He directed and set up scenes. Arnold writes about the “delight” that is the “manipulation” between subject and photographer.
The story was not published by Life. I wonder if the apparent involvement of Malcolm X was the reason.
It wouldn’t surprise me. There’s a difference between a political story and a subject giving a photographer access and cooperating on one hand and stretching that cooperation to directing the outcome on the other hand.
I’ve mentioned story-finding above already. But John Vink’s work from Burkina Faso (1985) shows story-finding happening in the field.
While photographing nomadic families collecting water, he realized that the story he needed to tell was about water management in the Sahel. A topic that sits on the fringes of the crisis that was the dominating story. Instead of focusing on drought and famine, his reporting experiences led him to an angle that digs a little deeper: the measures that could end the crisis. It turned into a career-long endeavor for the photographer.
Finally, two fascinating observations from the fieldwork that is reporting.
Cristina García Rodero’s pictures from a maternity ward in Georgia (the country) in 1995 show the little wonders of reporting from abroad.
Her beautiful pictures of a woman giving birth and a nurse caring with passion were made in a cramped room. She relied on sign language and connected with the people around her through empathy, patience, and passion that showed through her focus and concentration. Her words reveal what the pictures already show: a moment of human warmth, carefully reported.
Paolo Pellegrin features multiple times in Contact Sheets. His Kosovo assignment from 2000 gives us pictures that are as inspiring and vital to photojournalism as many pictures of conflict or humanitarian crises are.
But his words on how he worked with the people, how he carefully “intruded” and respected their feelings are key lessons.
He struggles to justify intruding at all, but stresses (to us, them, and himself) that it’s “reasonable” to do so, that it is important.
That respect and empathy can be seen in his pictures.
A Few Final Words
Of course, it’s not all positives in Contact Sheets.
I’ve never been a fan of the ultra-wide angle, flash in-your-face surprise street pictures of Bruce Gilden that also feature in this book.
Aesthetics aside, it’s not a work-ethics I enjoy seeing in the world.
His thought processes feel borderline elitist. But whether one agrees of anyone being, and proclaiming himself to be, the “epitome” of a New York City street photographer or parachuting into the streets of Tokyo because they feel what photographers there can do he can do better, is a gripe that’s got little to do with the book itself.
There are a few very abstract or artistic projects in Contact Sheets that sadly don’t tell me all that much. For example, Antoine D’Agata’s 2006 project called “Mexico” uses the contact sheet as a storytelling tool in, what I assume is a sequence of blurry video frame grabs of a junkie prostitute in a frenzy of a sort.
And from today’s perspective, it’s a bit awkward seeing the work (and reading the thoughts behind it) of photographers that have either been suspended following sexual misconduct allegations or have potentially shown reporting and/or editing techniques that violate journalism ethics.
But I’d say we leave those discussions for another day. And looking past those nitpicks, Contact Sheets is a precious book of photographic and journalistic inspiration and education that’s gifted me with thinking material and many relaxed hours of reading.
