Contacts - Elliott Erwitt (Elliot Erwit, 2002)

A reporter for the Magnum agency, Elliott Erwitt is a photographer of humor. His way of capturing coincidence is very personal. His favorite subject is the dog, which over the years has become a metaphor for the absurd, the bearer of all the world's petty miseries. This film is made entirely of contact sheets (contact prints of images on multiple strips of negative), with commentary by Elliott Erwitt. He introduces them thus: "What a photographer should never do is show or exhibit their contact sheets in public. It's too revealing... After these definitive words, let's take a closer look at my contact sheets." The photographer's tender, yet sarcastic, tone comments on these sheets, which are veritable little stories: Budapest train station in 1961, off-limits to photographers; Trouville beach in 1965 and a bather's struggle with his parasol; a tense Nixon-Khrushchev meeting; a nudist beach in England. All these images, taken with his Leica, allow him to unravel the mystery of these plates and that of the photographer's ultimate choice.