Collectif de photographes Contact Press Images

CONTACT 30: The Art of Photojournalism is a major exhibition celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Contact Press Images (1976-2006) with thirty contact sheets enlarged to 1m50 x 2m, and thirty photographers, including some of the industry’s biggest names: David Burnett, Gilles Caron, Annie Leibovitz, and Don McCullin. Curated by Robert Pledge, co-founder and president of the renowned international agency, whose introduction will preface the show, this exhibition examines the last three decades through the contact sheet — a fast-disappearing artifact in the digital era — and illustrates the art of photojournalism through thirty images selected from the contact sheets displayed, and thirty additional photographs, mainly color, excerpted from major photo essays produced by Contact-affiliated photographers. Each contact sheet and exhibition is introduced by a short text written by journalist and editor Jacques Menasche, and each image by a detailed caption. Biographies of the participating photographers are included along with a brief chronology of the agency’s history. Founded in 1976, nine months after the end of the war in Vietnam, Contact has since documented the era that saw the end of Apartheid, the fall of the Soviet Union, revolution in Central America, the opening of China, genocide in Africa, inter-ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the birth of the Internet, and the War on Terror.