Magnum Contact Sheets

Product Information

Looking at the contact sheets made me feel like I was walking with the photographer as they shot the subject. You know your process from reviewing what you shoot, and then to see it from what other people have shot helps you understand the process is different for all of us, but, yet, the visual path of other photographers is readable.

If you are sitting on the fence about purchasing this book, or picking it off the shelf, like me, I heartily recommend you do.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. This special and important photography book presents, for the first time, the very best contact sheets created by Magnum photographers. Addressing key questions of photographic practice - was the final image a set-up, or a serendipitous encounter; did the photographer work diligently to extract the potential from a situation, or was the fabled 'decisive moment' at play? Little did I realise at the time that they would also be useful for scanning old negs onto a computer! 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.

To give you an example, one section, 1976, is a photo entitled "The Teds" by Chris Steele-Perkins showing a Teddy Boy about to comb his hair. I have been exploring this book regularly over the past month and find that the biographical details and illuminating notes on the individual photographers work featured to be consistently rewarding. 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. An unauthorized biography of the agency, it will open your eyes to the personalities behind the iconic images. The photographs themselves are reproduced beautifully, and the paper quality does seem top-of-the-range.

Depending on the book, I will usually put markers in, perhaps in pencil or, in the case of glossy pages like this, little post-it markers. 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.

A few shots from the reverse angle, with Sunbathing Woman and Push-Up Man in the foreground and Hammock Boy in the background. He notices the painters high above, climbs up the tower, and makes several pictures, among which is that unforgettable image of Zazou.Then, you could imagine them in the office or lab peering over the sheets with a loupe and china marker, talking over the selection with a colleague or editor.