This exhibition is centred around a selection of fifteen giant contact sheets made since 1976 by the photographers of Contact Press Images. As the world has now fully entered the digital age, it is doubtful that a show of this type will exist in another thirty years. Contact sheets -and indeed the very film that has been a staple of the photographic profession since the advent of 35mm cameras in the late 1920s - are fast disappearing, destined to become artefacts of photographic history along with tin plates, autochromes, and glass negatives.

 Structural forerunner to both the photo essay and the television news segment which succeeded it, contact sheets such as the ones shown here in an enlarged form, also encourage a meditation on what will be lost without them. For they are more than an editor's tool, a presentation of sequential frames. They are in fact a cinema, a story. Providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of unfolding events and a record of the photographer's mental process, some record a wandering eye; others an eye "zeroing in." Some are fluid in narrative, others disjointed - owing to the photographer's alternating use of several cameras. Most are black and white, some colour. But whether shot in 35mm, in medium or panoramic format, all these contacts offer an increasingly rare commodity: truth - unvarnished, unmanipulated, and unrepeatable.

 Meant to inform viewers about the history of the last three decades, this exhibit also showcases single images: one per contact sheet, plus an additional number of equally "iconic" images by photographers affiliated to the agency during its thirty-year history. These important images, shot predominantly on Kodachrome 64 slide film (and for which no contact sheets exist), also contribute to our historical understanding of the period.

Robert Pledge
‘Contact/s 30' Curator
President of Contact Press Images

 Robert Pledge was born in 1942 in London, UK and moved to Paris, France at the age of ten. A student of West African languages and anthropology, he found his way into journalism as a specialist in African affairs writing for Jeune Afrique and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 1970 he coordinated a daring trip into Libya and Chad with the late photographer Gilles Caron and filmmaker Raymond Depardon. Later that year he became the editor of the French visual arts magazine Zoom, and, three years later, director of the New York office of the picture agency Gamma. In 1976 he founded Contact Press Images with American photographer David Burnett in New York. He has edited highly-acclaimed books and catalogues, and curated major photographic exhibitions throughout the world. In 2004 he received the Overseas Press Club's "Olivier Rebbot Award" for Red-Color News Soldier, which he authored with photographer Li Zhensheng and writer Jacques Menasche. He commutes between Paris and New York.

The World in Pictures

Contact/s 30: The Art of Photojournalism offers a rare insight into the making of some of the most iconic news images of the past three decades. The exhibition marks the 30^th anniversary of leading the photojournalism agency Contact Press Images and documents the major political events of the period.

This is not an easy exhibition to view - there are some fabulous and well known images such as Annie Leibovitz's famous, and to some people shocking, ‘portrait' of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, tragically taken shortly before he was shot and killed on the streets of New York - but these are pictures by news journalists and many of the photographs capture some far more tragic and confronting images. They form a unique document of the history of the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries.

Documenting moments such as Princess Diana's funeral procession, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, it is important to remember that while we look at these images from the comfortable distance of our TV screen or newspaper, someone was there on the ground taking this photo. Many people question the role and sometimes the ethics of the journalist - if you were there why didn't you change it or stop it, we might ask.

Photographer, film-maker and poet Robert Parkes addressed these issues in an essay he wrote for Life: "I have come to believe that no artform transforms human apathy quicker than that of photography. Having absorbed the message of a memorable photograph, the viewer's sense of compassion and newfound wisdom come together like two lips touching. And it is an extraordinary thing when an unforgettable photograph propels you from an evil interlude to the conviction that there must come a better day.

Let us give thought to those who distinguish themselves with cameras. They are no ordinary lot ... they are the ones who put themselves in the position to find memorable images of the maimed or dead, and thus they help to pull together a broken world. Hoping to make that world weary of disasters ... they allow their cameras to become swords in their hands.

One should never grow tired of witnessing these things - that is the photographer's charge to us, that we never forget . . . We remember the black hours with fury and shame and we are changed."[1]

[1] Parks, Gordon    100 Photographs that Changed the World, LIFE Books, Time Inc.

This is an Australian Centre of Photography touring exhibition  made possible by  Museums & Galleries NSW