Magnum Contact Sheets

Magnum Contact Sheets, edited by Kristen Lubben, reproduces the contact sheets behind well-known photographs by Magnum members, so a reader can see how each photographer worked a situation and picked the frame that ran.

Thames & Hudson’s pages for the 2017 paperback count 139 contact sheets from 69 photographers, shown with enlarged details, selected prints, press cards, notebooks and magazine spreads, including pages from Life and Picture Post. Each sheet comes with a text by the photographer or by someone chosen by the member’s estate. The publisher says the sheets span more than seventy years, from Robert Capa’s Normandy landings to Bruno Barbey’s Paris in 1968, René Burri’s pictures of Che Guevara, Eve Arnold’s of Malcolm X and Bruce Gilden’s New Yorkers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Inge Morath appear, as do later members including Jonas Bendiksen, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Alec Soth. The book treats the sheet as an object, a record and an editing tool, at the point when digital capture was making it obsolete.

Thames & Hudson’s 2017 page describes Lubben as a former longtime curator at the International Center of Photography and now executive director of the Magnum Foundation. Her earlier books include Susan Meiselas: In History and Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon.