David Armstrong (1954–2014) made intimate black-and-white portraits, and the people he photographed were usually within reach. David Armstrong Contacts, edited by the David Armstrong Archive and published by MACK in 2025, is the first catalogue of his work to appear since his death; it accompanied exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich in 2024 and LUMA Arles in 2025. Rather than survey a career, the book examines one working format: the contact print.

Two hundred and eighty-six black-and-white contact prints, made on medium format between 1974 and 1994, are reproduced at 1:1 scale and had not been published before. The choice is exacting. A contact print carries a whole roll at once — the shifts of light, the false starts, the glance held a beat too long — and reproducing it at the size of the original sheet preserves that density. The editing is itself an argument, and it is made by the Archive.

The sitters place Armstrong inside a specific world: friends in Provincetown, Boston and downtown Manhattan. Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, Mark Morrisroe, Rene Ricard, Gary Indiana, Jack Pierson, Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), Christopher Wool, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Teri Toye, Greer Lankton and Johnny Thunders all pass through these frames, several of them repeatedly, so that the book records a circle as much as a run of individuals.

For a collector, the interest lies in what an unpublished body of work can do that a retrospective cannot. The sequence comes out of the material rather than being imposed on it, and the volume — 320 pages, in a linen-bound hardcover with a tipped-in image — gives it room. These photographs have mostly circulated one at a time; here they arrive in the order they were made, for readers who would rather look than be told what to see.