Developing a series of limited-edition deluxe chapbooks featuring contact sheets of some of his most iconic images, award-winning photographer Michael Levin worked with BCreative for an informative essay to serve as the introduction of each book.
Dorothea Lange shot five photographs before she arrived at the moment that became her most famous image, Migrant Mother. Lange’s contact sheet from this time shows that she advanced gradually on Frances Owens Thompson, the worn down farm labourer photographed in a Depression-era migrant worker’s camp along with her four children. Each frame takes up a different vantage-point: in all of them the mother sits motionless, sunken into herself, staring blankly into the distance while the children spill around her, more curious and watchful of Lange’s lens. Only in the last frame do the children pull close to their mother and turn away from the camera allowing her face, ruled by worry, to stand out. Lange selected this particular image to send to local newspapers which made it a compelling portrait of poverty and transience. That one photograph moved a nation; the other five were lost to obscurity.
While a single image can be iconic, the contact sheet including that image provides context and a fuller story. A contact sheet illustrates the journey to reach a particular moment so there is the possibility for a personal narrative to show through the sequence of shots – an exploration into the intimacies of artistic choice. For a second-hand observer that key-hole view into the working process of a photographer feels privileged, even confidential. We are curious to learn what is there that didn’t get published; what was considered that eventually got rejected.
For his suite of limited-edition chapbooks, Michael Levin provides a rare glimpse of a photographer at work. Each book shows the puzzle of a particular photograph that Levin was trying to solve. Known for the precision and formal elegance of his images, it ‘s intriguing to see other photographs that Levin for some still unknown reason considered less than precise or too casual, too plain.
In some cases, it’s not always immediately clear why a photograph was rejected. There are several other negatives surrounding the image that became 30 Road which could stand up in their own right. Still, an artist’s eye is fickle and can find all sorts of flaws in a particular piece. Was it the slope of the rock face or the height of the water that doomed the other negatives that did not become Atlantic Ridge. In the case of Zebrato, the alternate negatives prove that Levin pays as strict attention to the backdrop of clouds as he does to the pier directly in front. A slight shift in their pattern and the full value of the moment is lost. At least it is lost for Michael Levin.
Levin undertook the Contacts project with an eye to his own past. As a young guy with a keen interest in the evolving sound of the Irish rock group, U2, Levin would devote hours and pre-internet investigative methods searching out various bootlegged tracks of their seminal album, Achtung Baby. The group’s music was starting to find its signature sound but the process was still open to experimentation and missed efforts. Levin would turn up rare finds of songs still working through their kinks and avidly listened for every step forward. Chords got dropped, notes were brightened and whole songs were completely reworked. Levin realised how raw talent requires careful editing to become true artistry. Contacts aims to prove this same point.
If, as one critic has it, the other negatives on a contact sheet are “competing images”, the rules for one photograph advancing over the others remain hard to know. Defining what makes a moment magic is subject to the alchemy of the artist. But with Contacts, Michael Levin lays bare his working materials and we the audience feel for a moment like a sorcerer’s apprentice. Still, there is always a trick to a photographer’s eye that no one else can explain. Even in truth, mystery abides.
