"Magnum Contact Sheets" Exhibition
International Center of Photography
This event has ended.
Often compared to an artist’s sketchbook, a contact sheet is the photographer’s first look at what he or she has captured on film, and provides a uniquely intimate glimpse into the working process. It gives a behind-the-scenes sense of walking alongside photographers and seeing through their eyes. "Magnum Contact Sheets" reveals how Magnum photographers have captured and edited their best shots from the 1930s to the present. The images featured— both celebrated, iconic photographs and lesser-known surprises— encompass more than 70 years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by Bruno Barbey, and the war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s famous portrait of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X.
“The contact sheet embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality,” said ICP Associate Curator Kristen Lubben, who organized the exhibition. “It records each step on the route to arriving at a particular image, and thus provides a unique window into the creative process.” This exhibition, through these fascinating and usually private series of images (many of them previously unpublished), celebrates what and how Magnum photographers saw along the way for nearly a century.
The exhibition functions—in the words of Magnum photographer Martin Parr—as an “epitaph to the contact sheet,” marking the end of the analog film era and the rise of digital photography.
[Image: Che Guevara "Havana" (1963) © René Burri/Magnum Photos]
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Schedule
from January 20, 2012 to May 06, 2012