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The Contact Sheets are the second part of the Shoulder to Shoulder series. The work begins as a kind of performance. The Contact Sheet became a means of communicating a narrative about the day / the act of performance / the dissemination of a message. Also, by making the work black and white and referencing analogue with a form used mainly as an editing aid for photographers, I wanted the piece to create a site of introspection for the photographic message.
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From 'Contact Sheet I' (2009)
"Major’s use of series of stills is a longstanding feature of her work and stems from when she was working with films, as, for example, in Try To Do Things We Can All Understand (2003-2008), freezing frames in an attempt to see whether she could apply Barthes’ notion of the punctum (that which is purely personal and dependent on each individual viewer, in contrast to the symbolic meaning of an image, or its studium) to the moving image. My impression, on viewing these works, however, is that she achieves a strong and powerful blurring of the two: as later generations of feminists went on to note, the personal is political. Our identity is formed of both our collective and individual past and present. We can escape from neither. The lives of others impact inescapably on our own."
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Anna McNay wrote of this series for Roves and Roams:
“The women in prison uniforms clearly evoke the fate of Richardson and her cohorts, and the placard calling for “deeds not words” echoes their radical approach, but through their deliberate coalescence of these early 20th century protests with those of more recent years, concerning such issues as climate change and welfare cuts, the photographs’ complex narratives place today’s protesters – Major’s audience, and Major herself, who appears in most of the shots, and attended the climate change march, as pictured, in a full length Suffragette prison uniform, borrowed from National Theatre Costume Hire company – in amongst their ancestors, both lending weight to the contemporary issues, but also revitalising old battles, and perhaps hinting that the struggle for gender equality is not yet won.”
From 'Contact Sheet II' (2011)
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