A Different Metaverse: the stories that contact sheets tell

Contact sheets are the closest thing to channeling a photographer's state of mind that exists. They are the first thing students learn to print in a darkroom, and I tell my students that it's a "table of contents" to their rolls of film. A visual record of their thinking and making, of their sorting and deciding. For anyone who's never made or seen one, a contact sheet is a roll of exposed film, cut into strips, placed into a plastic sleeve, and then exposed on a sheet of darkroom printing paper under a glass contact frame, producing an 8x10 sheet that is a visual index of the entire roll of film, in 1:1 resolution. Students make them to learn to edit from their rolls, as photographers aren't one-hour photo labs (do those even exist anymore?) and do not print all 36 frames. They edit. Learn from their mistakes. Learn to take more thoughtful, considered pictures. Through contact sheets, they learn to see how they think.

I started thinking about contact sheets anew when I came across these remarkable contacts from Graciela Iturbide's work in Juchitán in 1970, of one of her most famous images, a woman selling iguanas in the market.

The image with the crop marks on the left-hand side became the very well-known and highly reproduced image that has become synonymous with Iturbide's name. But how amazing is it to see those moments in the Oaxaca market as she encountered them, and to see all of the images she made of the woman. In Aperture's photography workshop series book on her, on Dreams, Symbols and Imagination, Iturbide said of the work:

Women of Juchitán go there to sell or barter; men cannot enter, though muxes, who are genderqueer, can. One one of my first visits, I encountered a woman carrying a cluster of iguanas on her head at one of the entrances. The iguanas had their mouths sewn shut so they wouldn't bite. She was about to take the iguanas off her head, when I said, "Please, please, señora, wait a moment.

Aside from the revelation of the iguanas' mouths being sewn shut—and the barring of men but acceptance of the genderqueer into the space—I was overcome with a sense of recognition and relief at seeing how in this famous photo shoot, only one image in that whole exchange looked the way I have come to know this image, and that the rest of the time, the entire interaction was utterly, sweetly and banally human: Our Lady of the Iguanas begins to remove her wiggly crown, pauses, comprehends the request, laughs. For the first few photographs she smiles. I can almost hear Iturbide pleading a request I have made a thousand times of my subjects: don't smile. The majestic, formidable and iconic image is shot. There is only one image on the whole roll that is the visual Iturbide was searching for. And it is enough.

I loved the validation it gave me in the knowledge that photographers I revere also have to enter the space of their subjects with a contradictory mixture of temerity and firmness, that they too must cajole their strangers into participating in this ephemeral dance in front of the camera, that at first subjects resist being told what to do but then, ultimately, submit to the photographer's demands. I was happy to see the eight shots that were not the iconic one, a testament to the fact that whatever I might tell myself, photographers don't always get it it one take. This contact sheet made Iturbide more accessible to me, as well as me more accessible to this moment in time.

I wondered if there were other such moments with more photographers' contact sheets that I could track down, more image-making goodwill in which I could partake.

I'd know that light anywhere, and always know this palette of color to be Nan Goldin's. There's something about the repetition of the scene that's affecting to me on a contact sheet in a way that the single image extracted and elevated from it is not. In this contact sheet the fact that Nan and her boyfriend are fucking under a large C-print portrait of Brian that Nan made of him becomes more present, a premonition of things to come. That fifth frame, #32, that post-coitus moment, feels sad and detached even though the two bodies are still touching. Something about the way Nan's crooked elbow on her knee physically blocks Brian from moving further into her field. The only frame that feels intimate in the whole montage is #9, in the lower left. The language and angle of legs, heads invisible, a possessive hand cupping her ass. The light seems to play the most in this frame, creating a soft spotlight in the middle of the bed. I also love the image of Nan running her hands through her hair, where she's a series of triangles in silhouette, moving out the moment and out of the frame.

These pictures were taken in 1983 in my bed on the Bowery in New York City. This is me and my boyfriend after sex. What I found intense in hindsight about this picture is its prescience in the expression of fear—foreshadowing future violence. I realized I needed to put this picture into my slide show and later print it in order to show myself in the same situation I had publicly shown my friends. —Nan Goldin, from The Contact Sheet, published by Ammo books.

Reading Goldin's words brought home the fact that our contact sheets can tell us things about ourselves and the people in our orbit that we may know cognitively, but don't know viscerally until we see it, as she admits to recognizing here. The contact sheet shows you behind the curtain of performativity, even if—especially if?—performance was the point. You can't argue with a fact clearly described, and this contact sheet is pure description of this relationship in body gesture, loneliness, and what it both shows and conceals.

Curious about the film type, which I wasn't familiar with, I learned that "safety film" was a term that Kodak began applying to their acetate-based films in 1948 to distinguish it from its nitrocellulose predecessor, which had a habit of spontaneously combusting. Nitrocellulose is the main component in gunpowder, and a central ingredient in blasting gelatine, aka dynamite. There's probably a metaphor in here about Kodak Safety Film and an utter lack of safe anything in the early 1980s, but I'm not going to chase too hard after it, as is my GenX right. But interesting to consider how explosions and photography have a long history together. In the mid-1800s there were dozens of weekly photography publications, mostly in the UK, and a not insignificant amount of column space was dedicated to reports of various attic explosions, mutilations and deaths occurring because a photographic hobbyist did not a chemist make.

As a corollary, the making of a contact sheet does not correspond to the making of an artist. But artists can and do make use of contact sheets. I was interested in this kind of thinking on the form as well: contact sheet not as record, but as source material that then gets appropriated beyond the enlarging the of the print.

In the upper level photo classes that I teach I give a lecture on the different approaches to sequencing, and on that day we watch Chris Marker's La Jetée, which almost none of them have ever seen. How many different ways are there to sequence a body of work, a book, a film? Narratively? Chronologically? By correspondence? Juxtapositions? Eccentrically? I usually don't point out that the film is made entirely of (422) still images until we start talking about it, and they realize that they didn't even catch that, as the film is so absorbing. What changes for the viewer if Marker makes a film of still images, versus using moving picture film? How does it change the experience of the film? How does repetition get used to memorable effect? What is a photo-roman and does it change how we view the still image, or how we view traditional moving film images?

What is a contact sheet when it is made and used in the service of a photo-roman?

Both still and moving film is concerned with the property of time; film theorist André Bazin remarked that photography "embalms time," whereas cinema "...presents an image of duration, a visual unfolding of time." The making of La Jetée subverts both genres, as film theorist Campbell Mah satisfyingly points out in his analysis of the film, where he writes: "By incorporating conventions of both photography and film, La Jetée exists as a middle ground that both self-consciously subverts and plays with the diametric oppositions between the two mediums..."

So how is Chris Marker subverting the form of contact sheets in his construction of La Jetée through a series of still photographs, with the contact sheets serving as a storyboarding device for this self-reflexive short film? It's an invigorating thing to look at and think about. On the left, the protagonist is equipped with a device that blocks his sight but provides access to other times, both future and past. The cut out frames suggest a roving around the subject, to capture the events from both an objective "omniscient" POV and from that of the person instigating the experiment, and observing his patient's reactions both up close and from a slight distance. In the mock-up in the in the upper right, where the man inhabits the dream space with this unknown woman that he encounters repeatedly when in the experiment, we have three POVs represented: his, hers and the objective, pulled-back camera angle that looks at them both simultaneously. We see each of them looking, and separately, but not what they are looking at. While the still image is definitive, it is not all-knowing.

One other set of contact sheets that were extracted and repurposed to create greater meaning than that which was photographed I found in Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg's work "Signing Off," which was a series of modified contact sheets from Raised By Wolves, a body of work he made on homeless teens in California from 1985-1995. Goldberg has said that he occupies the space of both "witness and storyteller," and in these two contact sheets he demonstrates his power of the latter by actively dismantling the tools of the former.

In the–literally–weighty tome Magnum Contact Sheets, edited by Kristen Lubben, Goldberg talks about what led him to tell the story of these two teenagers not with the photographs he took of them, but through another invented means that more accurately captured how the scene made him feel.

At the time I thought it couldn't get worse than this. They were two young kids, she from a wealthy Californian family and he from the other side of the tracks and country. Fuelled by the cheques that her parents sent her in the mail, they drank all day, every day. They were endlessly abusive and violent, calling each other Mommy and Daddy amid constant abortive attempts at sex, only to puke some more and then pass out. As exciting as it was in the moment to be in a place as intimate as this...immediately afterwards my stomach would seize and I became sickened as a depressive state settled in.

I thought hard as to whether I could use these images or not. After looking at the first proofs I was unhappy with their descriptive sharpness, so I...cut them up and [started] pasting them together into a collaged artifact. It was still too clear and graphic, [but the more] I tried to hide and the more markings I made, the more the violence and voyeuristic nature revealed itself. So I decided to hide everything behind photos of a TV set. This came from thinking about the hotel rooms where these children often stayed—transient shelters for their tangled lives.

I imagined being in one of these rooms, with the kids passed out from too much of something, and the TV going, and it's 3am and the station is going off the air and the American anthem is playing and a flag is waving, and then it signs off to static. I used words to describe what you couldn't see. They were typed out and taped underneath the contact sheet to complete the story.

This reworking and re-imagining of these contact sheets by Goldberg gobsmacked me. It shows me the power of going beyond witnessing and recording an event to interpreting it through one's whole person, creating an experiential diary of these self-destructive teens and the one watching it happen who desires to explain it but not judge it. If I ever make anything half as clear-sighted and revelatory as this I will die a satisfied artist.

All this delving into the seeing of other photographers and artists that deal in this sequential visual sketchbook called the contact sheet of course had the effect on me of spending hours in my storage area, combing my own archives for contact sheets that I've made over the years.

I learned some interesting things about myself, not at all of which I'm proud of but they are all truthful:

I don't make contact sheets of everything. I have zero contact sheets from a fantastic project I began while I worked at the largest nightclub in Chicago as a shotgirl. I knew those images were electric and I chose directly from the negatives and printed (what feel hedonistically expensive now) 16x20s of those. Generally, when I did make them, I seemed to do so at the start of projects, such as the one above in grad school, and also when I wasn't confident about what I was making, or thought that maybe what I was doing was a bad idea, as in this work below that I made on Civil War re-enactors:

Grad school is a place of trying things out, trying on different aspects of your chosen medium as if in a dressing room. Here, I think I was playing at editorial photographer on assignment. Except that it was self-assigned, my own assumptions and understanding about race and racial history in the U.S. was grossly unexamined and little understood then, and looking at these now I don't know if a body of work on this subject can or should be made without also soundly condemning it. As someone who spent a lot of my formative years in the U.S. South, I was trying to withhold judgement then as a photographer. That positioning seems timid and wrong now. Can you rework old, naive work with new, less-naive eyes? If I were to do anything with this now I'd turn it into a project about Whiteness, and my own then-complicity with that which was both gendered, regionalistic, and susceptible to the whims of the boyfriend I was living with at the time, who looked upon all of it like a giant field trip where people blow stuff up for fun.

I'm grateful that I have more self-awareness now, but regretful of the relationships that my choosing to do this work cost me back then.

One thing that seems obvious in this exploration of contact sheets that I haven't yet mentioned, is its inevitable anachronism in a world of millions of digital files. How can we track our visual thinking without rolls of film to hold us accountable for out choices in a way a trashcan icon cannot? I found an imperfect tool. Shalva Gegia, an Amsterdam-based web developer, made a little ingenious script that will make a contact sheet for you out of digital files. I finally went back in and made a couple contact sheets of that shotgirl work that I was so cock-sure about that I never bothered to then. New means of looking at old things means looking at them anew.

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