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The week of November 15-22, 2008 marked the launch of FotoWeek DC, an annual gathering of the diverse and wide-ranging photography community, including photographers, museums, universities and all those involved in the profession. In addition to an unprecedented number of exhibitions and events around town, visitors were treated to NightGallery DC, a digital slide show of large-scale photographs projected on museum walls. The festival has ended but the celebration continues. One of the most notable highlights from FotoWeek DC was the exhibit called "Contact/s: The Art of Photojournalism."

Once ubiquitous in the photography world, the existence of the contact sheet is dwindling with the emergence of digital. But it represents an important part of photography.

Marked by red, blue and yellow grease pencils, annotated with circles and arrows, these miniature "films" have represented a crucial link between events and publication since World War II.

Indeed Annie Leibovitz says she may have never gotten the shot of Queen Elizabeth, if viewing the contact sheet hadn't calmed the anxious Queen down.

A new exhibition showcases the last four decades of photography through the medium that helped shape it: the contact sheet.

"Contact/s: The Art of Photojournalism" presents a selection of 25 contact sheets made since 1976 by the photographers of Contact Press Images.

Structural forerunner to both the photo essay and the television news segment that succeeded it, contact sheets are more than an editor's tool or a presentation of sequential frames. They are in fact a cinema, a story. Providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of unfolding events and a record of the photographer's mental process, some record a wandering eye; others an eye "zeroing in."

Some are fluid in narrative, others--owing to the photographer's alternating use of several cameras--disjointed. Most are black and white, some color. But whether shot in 35mm, in medium or panoramic format, all these contacts offer an increasingly rare commodity: unvarnished, unmanipulated, and unrepeatable truth.

Meant to inform viewers about the history of the last three decades, this exhibit also showcases single images: one per contact sheet, plus an additional number of equally "iconic" images by photographers affiliated to the agency during its 33-year history.

Previously toured in China, Bangladesh, Australia, France and Belgium, the D.C. debut at FotoWeek is Contact/s first showing in the U. S.

As the world has now fully entered the digital age, it is doubtful that a show of this type will exist thirty years onward, says its curator. Contact sheets-and indeed the very film that has been a staple of the photographic profession since the advent of 35mm cameras in the late 1920s-are fast disappearing, destined to become artifacts of photographic history along with tin plates, autochromes, and glass negatives.

Mining the historic archive of Contact Press Images, CONTACT/S revisits all the form's power for storytelling and intimacy. Spanning nearly half a century and dozens of countries, it puts the reader in the room- standing next to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran as he greets the largest crowd in history after his 1979 return to Iran, or among Kosovar refugees as they are forced to flee their homes in 1999. From apartheid in South Africa to firemen raising the US flag over Ground Zero in New York on September 11, 2001, CONTACT/S allows readers to peer behind the scenes of history.

The show features work by photographers: David Burnett, Gilles Caron, Annie Leibovitz, Li Zhensheng, and Don McCullin. Each revolves around a single marked contact sheet, accompanied by enlarged details, one printed frame, and photographers' first-hand recollections of the day the roll of film was shot. The result is a photographic tour de force, a study in the process of photojournalism, and a history lesson in the second half of the twentieth century.

Each contact sheet is introduced by a short text, looking behind the scenes of the day the roll of film was taken, written by journalist and editor Jacques Menasche, based on interviews with the photographers. Each image is accompanied by a detailed caption.