Past Exhibition: Contact/s 30

Sunday, 06 December 2009 00:00

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

This exhibition included some fabulous and well known images such as Annie Leibovitz's famous, and to some people shocking, ‘portrait' of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (above), tragically taken shortly before he was shot and killed on the streets of New York.  The pictures were all taken by news journalists, and the photographs formed a unique document of the history of the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries.

The exhibition documented moments such as Princess Diana's funeral procession, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. It 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.

Photographer, film-maker and poet Robert Parkes addressed these issues in an essay he wrote: "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."