For Contact Press Images, as for much of the world, September 11, 2001 effectively inaugurated a new era, posing new challenges, introducing new faces, and overnight ushering in a new political and cultural landscape. For Contact photographers and staff based in New York City, 9/11 was a day of both tremendous personal grief and professional activity, as captured in the book Eleven: Witnessing the World Trade Center 1974-2001 (Rizzoli International/Universe). Unintentionally reaffirming photography’s unique place in the world, with airports closed for six days the disaster simultaneously demonstrated that the new technologies, especially the internet and the digital transmission of images, were permanent features of the modern world. To manage the agency’s transition to this new technological theater while maintaining continuity with its past has been Contact’s goal ever since. Under the guidance of Robert Pledge — who founded the agency with American photographer David Burnett in 1976 — and office directors Jeffrey Smith (in New York) and Dominique Deschavanne (in Paris), both of whom have been with the agency for over a decade, Contact established a digital domain, including a fully updated website, scanning and transmitting facilities, run by Tim Mapp in New York and by Franck Séguin in Paris. The so-called “war on terror” and its consequences became an obvious preoccupation of the agency after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and many of its photographers, including Australian Stephen Dupont, South Korean native Yunghi Kim, British writer and photographer Nick Danziger, and famed British war photographer Don McCullin, subsequently worked in Iraq and or Afghanistan, as did two new members, Americans Kristen Ashburn, winner of the Canon's 2004 Female Photojournalist Award given annually by the French Association of Women Journalists (AFJ) for her work on AIDS in southern Africa, and Sean Hemmerle, who has been documenting the effects of American military might since 9/11. In a broader sense, the new global conflict was also considered by French native Nadia Benchallal in her decade-long work on women in the Muslim world, American Alexandra Avakian, whose story on Muslims in America was produced for the National Geographic, and Italian Giorgia Fiorio in her long-term project on “spirituality” around the world, of which Islam is a major component. Other recent additions to the Contact roster include veteran British photographer Charles Ommanney, a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine who has been covering the Bush White House, and Americans Edward Keating, a former staff photographer for The New York Times, and Justin Guariglia, who specializes in Asia. Yet despite considerable changes, the agency continues to be anchored by the work of its veterans, including agency co-founder David Burnett, who remains one of the most sought after photographers working today, Indian Dilip Mehta, French native Frank Fournier, Israeli-born Alon Reininger, American Kenneth Jarecke, Swiss native Tomas Muscionico, and photographic legends Annie Leibovitz of the US, who produced two new books since 2001 — Women, with an introduction by Susan Sontag in 2001, and 2003’s American Music (Random House) — and Brazil’s Sebastião Salgado, whose latest book, The End of Polio (Bulfinch), appeared in 2003. Now approaching its thirtieth year, Contact Press Images continues to adapt to new realities while maintaining its focus on long-term photographer-driven projects, many of which have resulted in books. Delayed by the events of 2001, but finally published in 2003 was the historic Red-Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Through the Cultural Revolution by Li Zhensheng (Phaidon 2003), which was drawn from negatives safeguarded for nearly forty years, edited by Robert Pledge, and written by Li and Jacques Menasche, a New York-based writer who also collaborated on Eleven. Since translated into five languages, Red-Color News Soldier was the recipient of 2004’s Overseas Press Club of America's Olivier Rebbot "Best Reporting from Abroad" Award, and has been exhibited throughout Europe. Pledge and Menasche subsequently worked together on Lori Grinker’s major new book, Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (de.MO 2004), her sixteen-year project documenting the lives of frontline veterans of the twentieth century. One of the last small independent photographic agencies still in existence, with just over twenty active photographers from over a dozen countries, and representing the bodies of work of another dozen, the agency’s mission has remained constant: to produce in-depth photographic essays of pressing global concern instead of “disposable” news, to pose difficult questions rather than provide facile answers, and above all to make important and lasting images – always with history in mind.