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My project of the past few darkroom sessions has been to print contact sheets for each roll of film shot this year. I’ve long been planning an epic post-development negative-filing post (part II to this one here) but for one reason or another haven’t gotten it together. This isn’t that post, but it ought to be a good introduction. Or at least an exercise for me to get my thoughts together.

Contact sheets! They’re a bit of work, and I haven’t actually regularly made them for 35mm film since 2004. When I moved to Japan I was more focused on making prints and figured that I’d always be able to catch up some other time. 3,000 rolls later, I’ve realized that is impossible- at least with the time and money I have available. But I also don’t have the funds to keep printing mediocre 11×14 images. The stack looked like this, almost two years ago. Having thus decided to save paper for contacts instead of prints that won’t be seen, the compromise was to print contacts for every roll shot in 2011.

Last November Hiromi Tsuchida told me to do just this– At a portfolio review at his place one evening he kind of got on my case for not making contacts and then went to a back room to return with a chubby, yellowed spiral sketchbook- he handed it to me and said that this is what I needed to do. Upon opening the over I was immediately treated to a selection of 8×10 contact prints of negatives shot during his Counting Grains of Sand series. Actually, one of the things that kept me from contact printing was the headache of how to organize everything and how to physically file it. Back when I was a student in Japan in 2001-2002 I printed on 8×10 paper and filed the prints in cheap plastic A4 sized clear files. The paper I use now is 10×12, a size that accommodates the negative file sheets which I currently use better than 8×10. However, the B4 sized files that would hold these are quite expensive. I mentioned this to Mitsugu Ohnishi about a week ago and he said that gluing contacts into a spiral scrapbook is exactly how I should be doing taking care of this. Turns out this is what every student from the Tokyo School of Photography was (and is still) instructed to do. Makes sense because both men were graduates of, and teachers at, that very school. Onishi explained that you don’t do contacts for anyone else but yourself so it doesn’t have to look good-it just has to work. And putting them in a slightly-larger-than-the-photopaper sized scrapbook allows one to write notes in the margins at will. Long story short, this is what I am going to do.

Honestly though, filing negatives is something I’m only somewhat good at. In 2004 I labeled the first negative sheet I shot in Japan with a “1″ and then the next was “2″. And so on. That works fine until you have to find a negative for a show. In 2007 for the Konica Minolta exhibition I ended up going through a thousand or so negative files, frame by frame, to find 20 particular negs that I printed for my portfolio submission- pictures printed over the course of 3 years. Since then I have been collecting negatives for exhibited prints in concise, non-chronological order.

For general filing, things are only roughly arranged by the date the film was shot. I’m not a stickler for getting negatives in order by day but only by month. Chronological accuracy is swapped for ease of handling- I figure in the long run as long as they are close enough, the system will be good enough. If I shot 7 rolls on one day they’ll be grouped together but other than that, it’s fairly relaxed. It’s not quite as if there’s a mob of future curators out there who will be in charge of managing the massive multi-continent retrospective of my photographic oeuvre after I’m gone. Scrapbooks it is.

What I plan on doing now is matching 300 contact sheets with 300 loose negative files. And then number them. It’s actually not a bad way to wind down the day.

Now for the part where I tell you what I learned from printing and looking at contact prints in the past 2 months:

I spent the past several years looking through negatives for the frames that interested me most with a loupe while hunched over a light-box. For the most part, I think I found what I was looking for. But with a contact print you are able to glance at everything at once- and suddenly the focus has been shifted from looking for individual pictures to simply seeing all of the pictures. And they are pictures, not negatives. It’s been enlightening to starkly see personal trends appear while flipping through pages, repeated themes/pictures that pop up whether you want them to or not– (if I never take another boring photo of people crossing the street towards me again I will be a happy man)– but also by seeing the misses so clearly (as opposed to simply flashing past through them with a loupe) I’ve been able to get a handle on framing issues I want to address in future exposures.

I’ve got a couple more sheets to make- the bulk of one more darkroom session, and then I’ll be off to Sekaido for a slew of scrapbooks and glue.

As for the technical aspects of the process:

1. I file “standard” negs in the cheap Fujifilm negative sheets at Yodobashi Camera. 1500 yen for 100. These get filed in King Jim series 2-hole B4 horizontal office binders.

2. I file “non-standard” (by theme) in the more expensive and less milky contact sheets made by Hakuba and file those negatives in Hakuba brand 32-hole plastic archival binders.

3. I print with my standard set of chemicals in my darkroom. (Papitol, Fujifilm stopbath acid, Kodak Fixer, bathtub wash) 4L of Papitol developer will handle 50 sheets of paper. So will a bag of Kodak fixer- – I do my contact print sessions in counts of 50. I can do 100 in a day but only if I can budget a good 8 hours straight. Evening sessions after work are manageable as the concentration needed for actual printing is negated and you just really only need stamina to keep placing glass on negative sheets and hitting the exposure button on the timer for the enlarger.

4. I print on Oriental paper. This places me in an awkward position when someone asks “What kind of paper do you print on?” and I truthfully have to say “Orinetal” but I am not mildly racist as it is an actual company, which unlike SOME COMPANIES, (glaring in your direction, Fujifilm. You and your gorgeous black and white fiber papers you are probably going to cut because you don’t make an effort to share them with the rest of the world), sells their paper abroad. I buy their 50 sheet pack RC based 10×12 paper. At 4000 yen it is the most cost effective choice when compared to Ilford and Fuji papers. More bang for your buck, so to speak. Or yen. That has a bit more bang at the moment.

5. That’s about it. I do place a small strip of black plastic cut from a photo paper bag along the edges of the negatives over the paper before I expose them under the enlarger. This leaves me with a white space to write information about the rolls, including my new numbering method: I think January 1st 2011 will read 11-1 with the next being 11-2, and so on.

6. What do you do with your contact prints? How do you file them? Any suggestions or a dialogue on this in the comments would be quite welcome.