Contact sheets offer an incredible look at the back end of a photographer’s process. Often hidden, they also present a slight enigma in that they also show all manner of warts. Every photographer is aware of the personal nature of contact sheets, which are used as a work tool to decide which images may eventually matriculate into the fine art print. They provide a record of all the great images that a photographer becomes known for, but also show the iterations, variants, and duds. They become objects unseen by the majority of the artists’ fanclub, the institutions, and rarely end up in books unless to highlight a single image. Of course, several books, particularly documentary and Magnum-adjacent catalogs, have featured contact sheets, and the world is richer for the experience. As with David Armstrong’s Contacts (MACK/Luma Foundation), the world is richer for the experience.

Knowing David Armstrong’s place in the historical timeline of photography is not necessary to unlock the brilliance of the work in this thick tome of contact sheets, but it helps. Armstrong is from what might still be referred to as the Boston School of photography, an unofficial club of incredible image-makers from the 1970s who made their way from Massachusetts to New York and lived through the glory of New York’s riotous times in which music, art, and poetry all found root in what would become a burgeoning art market and scenes. David, as well as Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisroe, Philip Lorca di Corcia, and more. What makes these associations pertinent is less about a particular style than about a camaraderie that speaks volumes about photography, culture, and the socially devastating epoch of the AIDS epidemic. Many of the lives seen in this book and in many of Nan Goldin’s works in particular would document the morose and terrible loss of life during the 80s and 90s.

With all of that said concerning the context of Armstrong and his place in history, flipping through the book instills a magical sense of looking at these small, precious images in their multitude, undergirded by the architecture of the 8×10 contact sheet, a Modernist reading of the lines superimposing a type of obtuse order over the portraits. The intimacy of reading contact sheets is one of their principal forms of allure. In a world where everything is exaggerated, enlarged, particularly in photography, the small 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 images need type and a roaming eye to detail the particulars of their magic. This relationship to Armstrong’s portraits allows the reader a forensic way to dissect the surfaces, to imagine the pictures bigger, but without delivering, thus enforcing an acceptance of what they are over their potential as prints. They are: “good enough”.

Seeing Armstrong’s archive in this manner is quite a love affair. As you sift through it, you see how young everyone was, and before nostalgia can rip away all the feeling of that, one is confronted with the stone-cold reality that so many people are gone. It is about youth, about the early days of pioneering artistry, but in the end, the melancholy seeps in. Cookie-Mueller is not just Cookie Mueller, muse. She is a writer, actress, and star whose life, documented by Armstrong and Goldin, the twins of photography, exemplifies the desperate living of those times, but also the last dalliances of Twentieth Century anarchic bohemia on the shores of the Eastern Atlantic. Sadness has prevailed.

Fortunately, I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same, except you won’t have to worry about rent, mortgages, or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite, cigarettes, cancer, AIDS, or venereal disease. You will be free. CM

With this in mind, and with Wade Guyton’s fantastic editing and curatorial missive, the book of these contact sheets serves as a legacy to all the love and romance found during those times. Guyton, whose own work could not be further from Armstrongs is a fitting choice to have put this together at the late Armstrong’s request. Guyton is a master of printing, employing variations of abstraction in his work fabricated from an intense process of scanning and printing large slices of abstract photography, adjacent imagery that read as ethereal and strange glitches from our contemporary world, with a nod to modernist chairs, and other faux-architectural elements reminding one of the experiments of the Bauhaus.

The reason it makes sense that David chose him for his posthumous archives’ first curatorial outing is that he would come from the outside, yet being familiar with the artist, the choices he instilled in this exhibition and book rely on the material of archival existence, the physicality of its operations. Whereas another curator might have chosen to focus on single images, the volume of Guyton’s choice makes the effort both personal and scholarly, even if unintended. Make no mistake, this is an incredibly detailed and essential reference book on David’s work, but also on the social relationships of the times, and, because of the artists within its lasting legacy, a profound achievement in documentation. For these reasons, the book is an absolute must for photography enthusiasts, LGBTQIA+ researchers, and those affected by the people within. Much of what happens now with LGBTQ artists has its precedents in the vociferous, fierce art and lives of Armstrong and his people. New York in the 70s and 80s, whether through the lens of Armstrong, Pierson, or Mapplethorpe, were/are revolutionary.

This is an essential book. You do not need to be from Boston, New York, be gay, or straight to understand its value. AS an archival gesture, no expense was spared, and the value of its effort will exceed the short year of its production and exhibition. We need more books like this. So much of photography’s true identity lies in its process, not its icons. After one has skimmed through the surface of the medium, peeling back the layers to find the integral tissue of its order, it has a much more affecting and vital contribution to art, culture, and social life. This book has my highest recommendation for all of those reasons and the pure joy, even if shaded by melancholy, that it enables.

David Armstrong

Contacts

MACK/LUMA