The Contingency of Eye Contact: A Memoir 1970-1975
The Contingency of Eye Contact: A Memoir 1970-1975 is Max Pam's most text-driven book. It is a first-person account of the years in which he left Australia and began the travelling, image-making life that would define his career.
The book opens with his parents' story, not his own coming of age. They met at the East Gippsland fire brigade ball in 1943 and married after his father's demobilization from the New Guinea campaign, raising him through a working-class Melbourne childhood. From there the memoir moves into 1970 to 1975. Pam's own prose runs alongside black-and-white photographs he made in those years, as he shifted from a directionless young Melburnian into a photographer setting out to travel. Éditions Bessard published the book in Paris. It was shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Prix du Livre in 2024.
Max Pam has periodically folded memoir and journal text into his photobooks, as in Ramadan in Yemen. This title extends that method into a sustained personal history. It covers the five years before the extended travels through Asia, the Indian Ocean rim, and the Middle East that he later documented in Going East, Indian Ocean Journals, and Ramadan in Yemen. It is his most recent collaboration with Éditions Bessard, the Paris publisher that has issued several of his titles since 2011.
