Losing contact

I was given a copy of Magnum Contact Sheets for Christmas and reading the introduction is a poignant reminder of past processes. The contact sheet was the photographer’s or editor’s first view of the pictures. I started-out with film and I too remember the ritual of the cutting of the dried negatives into strips, the printing onto paper and the final review of the pictures with a magnifying glass and a cup of coffee. This was the time to choose between variations of a picture, to think about cropping and shading. The contact sheet showed a narrative of the order in which I saw things and how I explored the subject. Or more usually, a series of mistakes and near-misses.

This process has been easy to replicate with digital. My screen shows thumbnail images in date and time sequence. There is a lot less work involved, and the screen looks a bit like a traditional contact sheet. I generally look at them using IrfanView though – it lets me skip forwards and backwards through the sequence and is happy to display files in any format, including raw. Since we all tend to shoot more pictures with digital, this is an easy way to whizz through what used to fit on a single sheet of 10×8.

What the introduction to the Contact Sheets also described was the workflow of film-based news photographers getting their pictures back to the agency. Film might be developed locally by the photographer or trusted to some who could get it home. The photographer would send the film plus captions, or perhaps negatives, sometimes even a marked-up contact sheet. Otherwise it was down to the editor to choose the frame and the crop.

Then digital happened. Now the photographer can choose from the camera, transfer to their phone or laptop for a bit of tweaking and some captioning, and send immediately. I went to a talk by a sports photographer who shot football matches. He would be sending his first pictures before kick-off and had macros set up on his laptop to rapidly caption the pictures for sending. It was a treadmill, and he would expect to take hundreds of pictures for each match. He wore out his cameras, so renewed them regularly. He also had one camera fitted to each lens, to save the time of swapping lenses and missing a shot. Every other photographer at the match was doing the same, so to do any less meant not selling his pictures. That’s almost a caucus race.

The description of news photographers getting the pictures home reminded me of when I happened to be working for a newspaper group at the end of film but before the rise of the machines digital. They were working on faster turn-around from photographers in the field. What they built was a flight case containing a film scanner, a small laptop, a modem and a satellite phone. The photographer would shoot Polaroid’s Polachrome or Polapan film, which could be developed on the spot in a few minutes. Then they picked the frame, scanned and captioned it and sent it back over an expensive and slow link. But it worked. What I remember in particular though is one set of kit that was sent back damaged. It had been left in a hire car for security, but the car was in a street that suffered a car bomb. The flight case still had bits of shrapnel stuck in it and the kit inside looked like it had been machine-gunned. A reminder that these people worked in dangerous places (and that a lot more people lived in them). In the corner of the room where we were gawking at the wrecked kit was a PC that did the downloads from the agencies. We would constantly see developing disasters scrolling down the screen and know that a selection of this suffering would be tomorrow’s news.

It does beg the question though of whether the pressure to be the first or the most immediate is adding value? It takes time to send a photographer somewhere, whereas you can take a phone picture from a local witness immediately. So the newspapers fired their photographers and lost the ability to go into depth with a story.

I had my own minor attempt at reporting from the cheap seats. The Manchester Universities (at the time they were separate) hold an annual overnight 55 mile sponsored walk. Each year at least one person runs it. So I thought to get a picture. I worked out when a runner was likely to arrive at the finish and went down to see. True enough, the first runner had just arrived. So I snapped a few pics, wrote a few details and dropped the film and notes off at the Manchester Evening News. They didn’t use the pictures but did put a small article inside. I got my negs back and a small cheque. This was enough for a takeaway for two that night, which made this student and girlfriend very happy. Perhaps if my photos had been any good it might have been a sliding-doors moment and pointed my life in a different direction? Why worry? I’ve had a great life and who’s to say a different track would be better? That’s beside the point though – for a brief moment I was a cheap stringer for the MEN. Incidentally, the guy who ran 55 miles seems to have been a fell and long distance runner. His name appears in multiple race results sheets on t’interweb so I guess for him it really was a stroll. (I’m not naming him, not without his agreement.)

First finisher, Bogle Stroll. 55 miles in 7.5 hours, wearing a paint-stained tracksuit and trainers. If you recognise him, drop me a line,

And for a relevant aside – I went back and found the pictures from my contact sheet files. I had a guess at the year and flicked through only a few pages before finding the pictures in March of the year I guessed. It was quicker than firing up the computer to do a search.

The finish of the Bogle Stroll. It was the day after the Week of Action, obviously,

But getting back to news media, I don’t think that immediacy has increased analysis. The ability of anyone to broadcast a picture through social media, bypassing any analysis and with the ability to mis-label or entirely construct an image means that we could be subject to a blizzard of instant images demanding our immediate and unconsidered response. One proposal seems to be to add a certificate of truth to images to prove that they were taken at the time and place claimed and have not been altered. Good luck with that. Even ‘unalterable’ film negatives could be staged and things only got easier with digital. I think we have to find our way back to experienced journalists we can trust: photographers and writers who can work together to explain the context and meaning of an event and help us understand it. The alternative is believing influencers who claim they saw crisis actors (and please also click on the link to buy their promoted vitamin supplements).

Ho hum. I’m off to look through my Magnum book and listen to some long-form news-analysis podcasts. And if anyone really wants to know, I can tell you why the moon landings were not faked.