Vintage Contact Prints

The Archive holds a large number of unique vintage contact prints – small photographs made by laying the negative directly onto the surface of the light sensitive paper. Terence Donovan meticulously reviewed his contact sheets, indicating his selected frames by piercing them with a pen or marking them with a chinagraph pencil. He discarded the contact prints of the frames he did not want used, keeping only those that he felt good enough to print or publish. These small, original contact prints of single frames (some more than fifty years old) were kept with his negatives and remain in his archive. They provide an important insight into Terence Donovan’s working process and give us vital information about which shots he felt were most successful from the many hundreds of thousands of photographs taken.

Photographs: Nick Turner/Pentagram