Contacts
(1989)Streaming Episode Guide
Conceptual photography | The revival of contemporary photography | Contacts, Vol. 1: The Great Tradition of Photojournalism | Top 5 Episodes
Conceptual photography
Conceptual photography is explained by the great masters in this series from the Contacts collection.John Hilliard
Episode 10 - 1-01-2004
Born in Great Britain in 1945. John Hilliard has adopted a conceptual approach to modern photography that questions the norms of photographic language and practices. His work constantly probes the proces of making images: what is light ? Can the film freeze time ? Is the subject what we see ? Can our vision of reality do without fiction ?
Haven't Seen
Wolfgang Tillmans
Episode 9 - 1-01-2004
Born in Germany in 1968. Abstracts, portraits, landscapes or still lives, Wolfgang Tillmans engages every traditional photographic form in order to revolutionize approach and perception. Beyond its documentary value, his work reveals the true nature of viewpoint: an invisible line linking the artist's inner landscape to his or her subject without failing to impact the viewer.
Haven't Seen
Thomas Struth
Episode 8 - 1-01-2004
Born in Germany in 1954. Struth strips bare the structures of our cities, lives and dreams. His photographs reveal the relationship between urban space, social group and the representation of the sub-conscious.
Haven't Seen
Roni Horn
Episode 7 - 1-01-2004
Born in the United States in 1955. Roni Horn's journey in photography is that of a highly unusual initiation. It takes its source in graphic design, explores sculpture, questions writing, then returns to the essential: the subtle grammar of signs and images, Iceland is his subject of predilection, the entry point into his relationship with the world as well as the metaphor of her work: life is made of cycles in which time, nature, death, the visible and invisible call and answer each other.
Haven't Seen
Martin Parr
Episode 6 - 1-01-2004
Born in Great Britain in 1952. Focusing on the blemishes of Western society, Martin Parr's lens takes aim at hyper-consumerism, packaged leisure and boredom in a derisive slant on our ways of life. His work deciphers social codes using a particularly subversive rule: lucidity is inseparable from humour.
Haven't Seen
Georges Rousse
Episode 5 - 1-01-2004
Georges Rousse or a different investigation of space, tracing hieroglyphic writing on the walls and floors.
Haven't Seen
John Baldessari
Episode 4 - 1-01-2004
A student at San Diego State College from 1949 to 1957, John Baldessari produced paintings attempting to establish a relationship between painting and language.
Haven't Seen
Hilla Et Bernd Becher
Episode 3 - 1-01-2004
A journey through post-war industrial landscapes and new objective photography.
Haven't Seen
Christian Boltanski
Episode 2 - 1-01-2004
"What will be the image that will remain?" is the leitmotif of Christian Boltanski's photographic work.
Haven't Seen
Alain Fleischer
Episode 1 - 1-01-2004
Alain Fleischer expresses his taste for duplication and multiple experiments in his photographic work with very elaborate devices.
Haven't Seen
The revival of contemporary photography
Jean-Marc Bustamante
Episode 11 - 1-01-2004
The first photos of the artist date from 1974. He treats his prints like paintings.
Haven't Seen
Lewis Baltz
Episode 10 - 1-01-2004
Focus on industrial society and its evolution since the end of the 1960s.
Haven't Seen
Jeff Wall
Episode 9 - 1-01-2004
A resolutely modern photographic art.
Haven't Seen
Thomas Ruff
Episode 8 - 1-01-2004
One of the leaders of a new German generation. Ruff uses the photographic medium in a documentary and objective way, in large color formats.
Haven't Seen
Andreas Gursky
Episode 7 - 1-01-2004
The exhibition "Photography in Düsseldorf" traces the history of German photographic objectivity from the 1970s to the present day.
Haven't Seen
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Episode 6 - 1-01-2004
After studying economics at Rikkyo Saint-Paul's University in Tokyo, Sugimoto left Japan in 1970 to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
Haven't Seen
Nobuyoshi Araki
Episode 5 - 1-01-2004
The city, the women, the sky and the flowers seen by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
Haven't Seen
Sarah Moon
Episode 4 - 1-01-2004
A fashion and advertising photographer since 1968, she very quickly won praise and prizes in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, where her exhibitions were highly acclaimed.
Haven't Seen
Duane Michals
Episode 3 - 1-01-2004
14m
Haven't Seen
Nan Goldin
Episode 2 - 1-01-2004
For the first time in thirteen minutes of a monologue of raw truth, Nan Goldin tells herself in “Contacts” what binds her to her images.
Haven't Seen
Sophie Calle
Episode 1 - 1-01-2004
Sophie Calle is a visual artist, photographer, writer and director. His job is to make his life, especially the most intimate moments, his work using all possible media (books, photos, videos, films, performances...).
Haven't Seen
Contacts, Vol. 1: The Great Tradition of Photojournalism
Don McCullin
Episode 12 - 4-08-1990
Born in Great Britain in 1935. His war photographs have laid a landmark in the international press.
Haven't Seen
Helmut Newton
Episode 11 - 4-07-1990
Born in Germany in 1920. Star photographer of European and American glossy magazines renouned for his provocative images of women and fashion.
Haven't Seen
Mario Giacomelli
Episode 10 - 4-06-1990
Born in Italy in 1925. Taking pictures of hospices, earth-bound life and landscape in order to challenge time.
Haven't Seen
Leonard Freed
Episode 9 - 4-05-1990
As Leonard Freed sees it, being a professional photographer should be either fun or profitable - or an alternative to psychotherapy. End-prints have a life of their own, but contact-sheets are to look at and keep: Freed uses his contact-sheets to keep track of time.
Haven't Seen
Marc Riboud
Episode 8 - 4-04-1990
International newspaper photographer Marc Riboud has travelled the world and amassed forty years' worth of photographs, making a special study of India and China. But one of his most famous photographs is a picture taken in Washington in 1968, at a demonstration against the Vietnam War, of a girl holding up a flower in front of the guns.
Haven't Seen
Elliott Erwitt
Episode 7 - 4-01-2002
Magnum reporter Elliott Erwitt is a photographer with a sense of humour. He captures coincidences in a way that is totally unique. Dogs are his favourite target, and over the years they have become a metaphor for everything that is trivial, shouldering all the petty burdens of the world.
Haven't Seen
Édouard Boubat
Episode 6 - 4-01-1994
A tireless traveller since the Fifties, quietly humorous and always on the look-out for precious moments, Édouard Boubat has done spreads for all the big photographic magazines. "I don't ask myself whether a photograph is good or bad. What's important is that there should be some kind of energy."
Haven't Seen
Robert Doisneau
Episode 5 - 4-01-1994
From the late 1930s onwards, the streets of Paris and its suburbs were Doisneau's favourite subject. His images of the Liberation of Paris in 1944 and his famous picture The Kiss (Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville) have travelled all over the world. His contact-sheets - with humorous comments from Doisneau himself - add up to a chronicle of the twentieth century, a linear memoir of the photographer's time and place.
Haven't Seen
Josef Koudelka
Episode 4 - 4-01-1990
Famous chiefly for his photo-reportages of the events in Prague in 1968 and his pictures of the gypsies he lives with, Koudelka is a man who cannot stop looking. He refuses to talk about his strong, tragic pictures, saying "I'm a photographer: I'm no good at talking. If I've got something to say, that's what my photographs are there for."
Haven't Seen
Raymond Depardon
Episode 3 - 4-01-1990
Raymond Depardon rocked the foundations of documentary photography and photo-journalism by turning the photograph into a violent confrontation between reality and the subjectivity of the photographer.
In 1966, Raymond Depardon co-founded the Gamma agency. He was soon to rock the foundations of documentary photography and photo-journalism by turning the photograph into a violent confrontation between reality and the subjectivity of the photographer.
As he shows us his pictures of the asylum of San Clemente, Raymond Depardon talks about the photographer as curious bystander, as professional voyeur. These contact-sheets highlight the ambiguity of the role of the photographer, now and then turning out a good photograph - one you can look at without feeling ashamed.
Haven't Seen
William Klein
Episode 2 - 4-01-1990
William Klein has always refused to obey the rules. His consistently experimental work as a painter, film-maker, graphic artist and fashion photographer jolts us out of our cosy viewing habits. Klein uses the camera lens to set up a confrontational encounter with his subject. As Alain Jouffroy puts it, "For Klein, the act of photographing is physical as much as artistic. Photography should be like a shock of sensual, violent energy."
7.2/10Haven't Seen
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Episode 1 - 7-22-1989
Cartier-Bresson's talent obliterated the boundary between art and documentary photography. He was one of the founders of the Magnum agency, which turned photo-journalism into an art form, recording the great historical conflicts and documenting the social, political and private spheres of human existence.
Haven't Seen
Top 5 Highest Rated Episodes 7.2/10
William Klein
Episode 2 - 4-01-1990
William Klein has always refused to obey the rules. His consistently experimental work as a painter, film-maker, graphic artist and fashion photographer jolts us out of our cosy viewing habits. Klein uses the camera lens to set up a confrontational encounter with his subject. As Alain Jouffroy puts it, "For Klein, the act of photographing is physical as much as artistic. Photography should be like a shock of sensual, violent energy."
7.2/10Haven't Seen
