Contact States returns to the contact sheet not as an editorial tool, but as a finished photographic object.

Produced from sequential exposures made onto medium format film, each plate records the progression of an optical condition through time.. The full sequence is retained: variation, interruption, failed states and transitional moments remain visible.

Butterfly specimens suspended within controlled liquid conditions become subjects only in the loosest sense. The works are concerned less with representation than with observation: recording the behaviour of light as it passes through unstable physical conditions and resolves directly onto film.

These works were not conceived as contact sheets at the moment of exposure. Their final form emerged only through returning to the original medium format transparencies years later and recognising that selection obscured something essential: that the movement between images carried equal weight to the images themselves.

The image is not selected from the sequence.
The sequence is the image.