Silverstein Photography is pleased to announce First Contact: A Photographer’s Sketchbook. This exhibition, taken from the Magnum Photos Archive and a private Midwest collection, explores the photographer’s decision-making process in selecting images that capture the “decisive moment.”

For most photographers shooting in 35mm, the first tangible realization of the image-making process is the contact sheet: a single sheet of photographic paper that has been exposed to include a group of negatives or an entire roll of film. As a painter or sculptor sketches renderings before putting brush to canvas or chisel to marble, many photographers, especially photojournalists, use the contact sheet to evaluate various compositions, light exposures, and shutter speeds. Often the photographer will mark the individual images with crop markings and annotations in preparing a selection to print.

First Contact: A Photographer’s Sketchbook explores the notion of the “decisive moment,” a term defined by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." By placing these photographs side by side with their contact sheet, the viewer enjoys a unique opportunity to look into the artist’s mind in selecting the future “icons” of photography.

This exhibition includes works by Eve Arnold, Cornell Capa, Robert Capa, Elliot Erwitt, Leonard Freed, Paul Fusco, Bruce Gilden, Burt Glinn, Ernst Haas, Erich Hartmann, Constantine Manos, Susan Meiselas, Inge Morath, Eli Reed, George Rodger, David Seymour, Dennis Stock, and Alex Webb.

In the front gallery, several rare contact sheets from a private Midwest collection are displayed, including works by Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Man Ray, and Irving Penn, as well as a contact sheet from Diane Arbus’ Identical Twins series.