Contact sheets were once a core part of the work flow of of film photography. They belong to the days when rolls of film were printed in the chemical darkroom on contact sheets to be reviewed and edited in order to select the image worth printing. Now the images are scanned into digital file on a computer and the chemical darkroom has become a digital suite of computers and software.

Film is now an outdated technology and for a long time photography was on the margins of the art world, rejected until the 1970s because it was too instant, mechanical and effortless to be real art. The culture around photography – festivals, book publishing and selling, workshops, websites and prizes – has grown slowly as the old distinctions between art photography and conceptual art become increasingly hard to maintain. The battle to legitimise photography as an artform has, to a great degree, already been won at the moment when the nature of photography, as well as curatorship, is being questioned by a digital culture on the internet.

The democratisation of photography and distribution of photos via social networks has changed everything, and as curators are still standing back and ignoring the shift. They still think in terms of a photography gallery per se, even though we now live in a visual world in which visual art is produced by many kinds of media.