The loss of context

While I was deleting shot after substandard shot from a morning's photography I got to thinking about my old contact sheets from the days of film. When I look at them I can see how the images that were selected to print were arrived at. How one shot is subtly different to another similar shot. How some almost work. I can also see images that never stood a chance, but were tried nonetheless. Contact sheets are akin to sketch books, where things are tried out and used for future reference. They illustrate directly what was in an artists mind. That's why art historians, and students, study them. It's why artists keep them in the first place.

Any avid reader on photography will have come across contact sheets that contain iconic images. Images that are often viewed alone with no context at all but the caption or it's place in the photographer's oeuvre. Even when those images were made for documentary purposes as part of a set of shots.

Take, for example, Diane Arbus's famous photo of the boy with the toy hand-grenade. On face value it is one among many of her photos of 'freaks'. A young boy with spindly legs, grimacing,  tense arms by his sides and his braces in disarray. Clearly a deranged individual. Yet a look at the contact sheet reveals a different story. There we see a happy, well turned out, child enjoying a day in the park, happily posing for the camera like any well-balanced youngster would. Placed in the context of the contact sheet the iconic image takes on a new meaning. The image is the odd one out, not the boy.

Henri Cartier-Bresson made many many  incisive points about photography. "My contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail in a plank. First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in." (http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~ab/Miscellany/cartier-bresson.html)

Leaving aside the long term future storage and retrieval of images, digital workflow and the 'need' to maximise file storage space has probably already robbed photo-historians of the light taps. Only the final hammer blows will remain.

---