15 hours ago
The Analog Allure of Photographers' Contact Sheets
When George Tames, a staff photographer for The New York Times, spotted President John F. Kennedy leaning on a table, head bowed, less than a month into his presidency, he knew what to do.
He had observed Kennedy stand this way many times before, tilting forward on his palms to relieve his back pain.
But on this occasion, with Kennedy silhouetted against the Oval Office windows, Tames raised his camera and snapped two frames.
One ran as part of The Times magazine feature 'A Day With John F. Kennedy'; it became Tames's most famous photo.
When Tames next pressed the shutter, for the third frame in the roll, he had moved closer and to the side; Kennedy is in the same pose but here, he is simply looking down, reading some papers.
Those three frames appear postage-stamp-size along the bottom of a contact sheet from that assignment, along with something else: the definitive tick of a red grease pencil on Frame 2.
In contrast to the other frames on this roll, which show Kennedy going about the business of his day, in this image the president — alone, backlit, stooped — appears in a moment of tense solitude. If ever a photograph could show the pressures of the presidency, it is this one.
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Contact sheets — a positive print of a roll of negatives — evolved alongside 35-millimeter film as a convenient way to review small negatives: one roll of 35-millimeter film — or 12 frames of 120 film — fits neatly onto an 8 by 10 sheet of paper. The Times's photo archive is stuffed with contact sheets containing circles, ticks or crosses from grease pencils, tangible evidence of the editing process.
The process of reviewing a contact sheet typically involved a loupe and a red grease pencil, and often some apprehension. With a single contact sheet, a photographer could assess all the decisions and hesitations, steps and missteps that went into taking the photo. 'It's all there,' the renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said of contact sheets, 'what surprises us is what we catch, what we miss, what disappears.'
The use of contact sheets as an editing tool lived and died in the 20th century; in the 21st century the rise of digital photography has made contact sheets a darkroom relic. Few photographers still use them as a tool, but their analog allure has generated a second life. After all, a contact sheet is everything a digital photograph isn't: immutable, physical, finite.
They have been the subject of exhibitions, shows at galleries and photo books. At the Museum of Modern Art, you can see a contact sheet from Hans Namuth. Enlarged to stretch from floor to ceiling, it depicts the artists who lived on Coenties Slip, a street in the financial district of Manhattan.
With their grid format, contact sheets have been compared to the motion studies work of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. After his famous 'horse in motion' photographs, Muybridge turned his attention to human movement. He photographed men and women in a wide variety of activities — pouring tea, playing leapfrog and much more — which he sequenced and displayed as grids.
Muybridge's slices of action have a visual echo in this Times contact sheet from 1973 of a gymnastics event at Madison Square Garden.
Here, gymnasts hurtle through the contact sheet in cartwheels, leaps and twists.
But it was the gymnast caught midflight in Frame 18, tightly cropped to better emphasize the elegant symmetry of her arms and legs as she soars above the beam …
… that made it into the paper.
One morning in late November 1966, Neal Boenzi, a staff photographer at The Times, was on assignment at the Empire State Building, to capture the pollution hanging over the city.
In the contact sheet, Frame 17 is repeatedly outlined in red and blue.
It ran on the front page the next day. (The Times's caption began 'Islands in a sea of smog').
It also had a long afterlife: it won a New York Press Photographers Association Award in 1967 and, much later, it was the cover of Vampire Weekend's 2013 album, 'Modern Vampires of the City.'
But what the contact sheet truly reveals is what was on Boenzi's mind as he pressed the shutter on that hazy morning: the correct exposure to capture the dense morning air in just the right light.
A contact sheet from the Woodstock music festival in 1969, shot by the Times photographer Larry Morris also shows a shift in focus.
It emphasizes the crowds rather than the musician …
… shown in two frames at bottom left. It's Jimi Hendrix, to whose performance Morris seemingly had a front-row seat.
The precious few frames of Hendrix — Morris shot more on another roll — remained unseen for decades because of a spelling error ('Jim Hendricks') on the back of the contact sheet.
Look at this contact sheet of Barbra Streisand in her theater dressing room, after her debut in 'Funny Girl,' from March 27, 1964.
The photo ultimately published is taken from the side.
But the contact sheet gives us more: the photographer's lighting setup, Streisand's wardrobe, the two women standing in the door.
And in Frame 9 through Frame 11, visible in the mirror: the photographer himself, John Orris.
With contact sheets, it's these details that keep us looking.
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