One in a Million (or Dozen)
By WILLIAM MEYERS
July 19, 2007
The psychologist James Gibson tells us in
his influential book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"
(1979) that a photograph is "a record of what the photographer selected
for attention." The art is in the selecting, a point made vivid by
"First Contact: A Photographer's Sketchbook," the current exhibition
of contact sheets at Silverstein Photography.
A contact sheet is made by laying
negatives on a piece of unprocessed photographic paper and exposing it to
light. Typically, one roll of film will be fitted onto one sheet of paper. The
result, when the paper is developed, is small positive images of all the
negatives, usually arranged in the sequence in which they were taken.
Professional photographers and serious amateurs ordinarily take many more shots
of a given subject than they can possibly use, so having contact sheets helps
them select the few frames they want to exploit with enlargements. They examine
the frames on the contact sheet with a loupe, a jeweler's magnifying glass, and
try to imagine what they will look like if they are enlarged, an exercise that
is not infallible.
The contact sheets at Silverstein are the
work of either members of Magnum or other famous photographers, and they
include among their many little frames some very well-known images. One such is
Elliott Erwitt's frequently reproduced 1962 picture of two dogs and a person,
or rather, one whole itty-bitty dog, the front legs of a huge dog, probably a
Great Dane, and the stylish high leather boots of the woman who is walking
them. The picture is an example of Mr. Erwitt's droll visual sense, made
perfect by the absurd knit tam-o'-shanter the little dog is wearing and the
cocky stance with which he addresses the camera.
The contact sheet has six strips of 35 mm
film, each with six frames, tightly fitted one above the other so we can see
the whole roll of 36 exposures. The pictures are all basically the same. Mr.
Erwitt positioned his camera close to the ground in
order to look the little doggy in the face and only capture the front legs of
the big dog, and the woman's boots and the hem of her coat. But in 24 of the
shots the little dog is sitting, and that is not as humorous as when he is
standing because the disparity in leg size is not as apparent. And when he is
standing, he sometimes looks one way, and sometimes
another.
Six of the frames are outlined with red
china marker, an essential darkroom tool. The china marker is used because it
can easily be erased with a tissue. Mr. Erwitt probably had the six marked
frames made into roughs, or proofs, quickly done enlargements to give him a
better sense of what the negatives look like when they are made bigger. From
them he selected the one we are familiar with, and worked on it until he had an
enlargement with the tonal qualities and other characteristics he thought
necessary for the picture to succeed. If you have only seen the final result,
either as a print in a gallery or museum, or as a reproduction in a book or
magazine, it seems as if Mr. Erwitt just clicked his shutter once and got this
wonderful picture: The contact sheet, like successive manuscript drafts of an
author's book, shows the final result was not preordained.
Richard Avedon's contact sheet of shots
of Groucho Marx (1972), and Irving Penn's of Woody Allen (1972), are similar in
that the photographers knew basically what they wanted, and took multiple
exposures of essentially the same picture; in each exposure, though, the
expressions of the subjects are slightly different. But the really interesting
contact sheets are the ones that show the photographer noodling around like a
jazz musician as he tries to figure out what to do with his subject. The four
shots Arnold Newman took of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe (1944) show
four possibilities. In the first, O'Keeffe is alone staring at the camera. In
the next three, she is seated and Stieglitz is standing to her left, but in the
first of the three they are apart and both face the camera, in the second they
are closer together but face outward toward opposite sides of the frame, and in
the third she sits in profile and he stands facing front. In the last, the
merged silhouette of the dramatic black capes they are both wearing holds them
together as a couple, even as the different directions they look in maintains their identities as individuals.
Robert Capa's very first shot on a
contact sheet from 1951 shows a somber Pablo Picasso carrying a huge beach
umbrella to protect a radiant Françoise Gilot from the sun, an exquisite
photograph — and for the rest of the roll he followed them around the beach
taking inconsequential snapshots. Leonard Freed was shooting in several
locations until he ended up on Wall Street, and in the middle of the roll took
five shots of the overhead bridge on
If a picture is "the record of what
the photographer selected for attention," the contact sheet is the record
of how he did it.