THE CONTACT SHEET
"The illicit quality of the contact sheet is the source of much of the viewer’s fascination with it. Like reading someone’s diary or looking in their closet, the contact is not meant for public consumption. As Cartier-Bresson noted, “A contact sheet is full of erasures, full of detritus. A photo exhibition or a book is an invitation to a meal, and it is not customary to make guests poke their noses into the pots and pans, and even less into the buckets of peelings.”Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, is less insouciant than her husband, and speaks of her deep misgivings about letting her contact sheets be published, comparing them to the stream of free-associated talk of a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch. “I feel that by allowing myself to be violated [sic], and by publishing that which is most intimate, I am taking the very real risk of breaking the spell, of destroying a certain mystery.”"
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8884129/Magnum-agency-making-contacts.html)
Margaret Thatcher
Blackpool
October 1981
Peter Marlow
"I was a youngish photographer on assignment for Newsweek. We had a policy in those days, with our Nikon motor drives, of making what were called “in camera dupes”. This was so there was always an original slide, rather than a copy, to send out to the magazine network. I had a large Rollei flash on my Nikon F2 and simply blasted away during Thatcher’s speech, hoping to get that one shot which would end up on the cover of the international edition of Newsweek."
-Peter Marlow
No comments:
Post a Comment