Magnum Contact Sheets

Magnum Contact Sheets: Kristen Lubben: Amazon.com: Books.

This is an amazing book – possibly the best photography book I have. It’s huge and heavy: over 500 pages and contains more than 120 contact sheets from some seventy Magnum photographers. Besides the contact sheet (often with annotations) itself each sheet has a short description by the photographer on the background to the photo and often why one was selected rather than others taken at the same time. In all some 250 color and 200 black and white photos are provided.

It’s fascinating to see the selected photo in the context of the others around it. Not all of them are that spectacular – even the great photographers produced some mediocre photographs alongside the masterpieces. It also made me realize that it would be almost impossible to duplicate this now. I now process photos digitally – even those made with film cameras. So there are no contact sheets. The contact sheets showed both keepers and discards. In my Lightroom catalogue I only have keepers. The others have all been deleted. If other photographers do the same as I do there will never be an opportunity to compare as this great book allows us to do.