Abstract

Analogue materials and processes have almost completely disappeared from image-editing work. This is especially true of contact sheets made by placing negative strips directly onto a sheet of photographic paper. Their importance in the age of small-format photography can be gauged by the many thousands of them held in analogue image archives. That the contact sheet is sometimes called “photography’s sketchbook” emphasises its crucial role in the creative editing process. Since many archived contact sheets bear the marks of not just photographic but also editorial interventions, they provide a record of appraisal and selection processes. As the “Magnum Contact Sheets” presentation shows, the study of contact sheets now has its place in the story of photography. The analogue “Stern” Photo Archive, one of the largest surviving press photo archives in Germany, contains 3,424 folders full of the contact sheets that once formed the ‘interface’ between raw film and magazine page. Since 2019, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) in Munich has been systematically digitising these and preparing them for use by the public at large. This article addresses the contact sheet’s materiality, symbolism and potential, taking some of those stored in the “Stern” Photo Archive as examples

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