I think photographers should behave like him,” says Riboud, “he was free and carried little equipment” (p74). I'm an amateur photographer who likes making images with pinhole cameras, smartphones and everything in between. The yellow tabs are photographers I want to go back and explore further and the blue tabs are quotes or thoughts that I wanted to share.

Personally I'm fairly diligent with storage and back-up of digital files (touch wood) and still have many pictures from my college days, 15 years ago. And conversely some of my father's negatives and transparencies from the 1970s-80s have deteriorated over time (though others, as you say, almost look new). Depending on the book, I will usually put markers in, perhaps in pencil or, in the case of glossy pages like this, little post-it markers. No matter what level of photographer you are, your age or your genre of photography, I would urge you to get this book . Magnum Contact Sheets is a weighty book, dealing with many weighty subjects – war (Josef Koudelka, Prague Invasion), natural disaster (Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Earthquake in Armenia), birth (Cristina García Rodero, Maternity Ward), death (Robert Capa, Leipzig) – but Zazou the painter, as portrayed by Riboud, is lightness personified.

This is why I don’t enjoy using point and shoot film cameras and why I love scrolling back on my phone to pictures of my children as tiny babies.

You'll flip the pages and read the details and you will "get it" and be happy you digested this brick of a book. The average 35mmc reader perhaps needs no introduction either to Magnum, or to the concept of contact sheets.

Addressing key questions of photographic practice – was the final image a set-up, or a serendipitous encounter; did the photographer work diligently to extract the potential from a situation, or was the fabled ‘decisive moment’ at play? With the rise of digital photography, the contact sheet has, in many ways, been relegated an anachronism—a vestigial relic of the medium’s past.