John F. Kennedy George Tames/The New York Times

Contact sheets

My daughter, who likes to note that she was born the same year as the iPhone — 2007 — took disposable cameras to her senior prom in June and on a road trip a few weeks later. This was on trend, part of a Gen-Z embrace of the single-use point-and-shoots given to 1990s wedding guests.

The company that processed the cameras sent back prints and digital images, which my daughter promptly shared on Instagram. It also sent negatives, something she had never encountered and found utterly enchanting. When she started college recently, she hung them in a corner of her dorm room as a kind of art.

Perhaps this is why I connected with a recent Times article about contact sheets, the positive prints made from those negatives that photo editors of old used to select which images we’d see in the paper. Turns out my daughter is not alone in seizing on these analog artifacts as art in themselves. Contact sheets have been featured in gallery shows and coffee table books. The Museum of Modern Art is displaying a floor-to-ceiling version of one that depicts the artists who lived on a certain Manhattan street in the 1950s and 60s.

China vs. USA in gymnastics at Madison Square Garden in 1973. Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

The Times article is by Anika Burgess, who wrote a recent book on how early photography transformed our culture. It draws mainly from contact sheets in the Times archive. And it explores how the grease-pencil marks on the sheets reveal the thinking of photojournalists and editors.

Working from contact sheets was totally different from how photos are edited now. These days, photographers submit a few dozen “selects” to editors, all of which they imagine suitable for publication. With contact sheets, in contrast, editors were examining every frame they’d shot. One photographer likened it to someone reading your journal; another called the sheets “as private as conversations with a psychiatrist.”

Scanning the sheets is like a journey through the photographer’s mind at work. You can watch them reposition for a new angle, experiment with light and exposure, look at various characters in a scene. You can see how lucky timing intersects with talent to capture a surprising moment.

In Anika’s article, you also get to see the grease-pencil marks that show which images editors selected to tell the story. A Times design tool zooms in and out from the contact sheets to individual images as you scroll through. “The reader gets to experience the power of choice,” explained Maridelis Morales Rosado, a photo editor who worked on it.

The piece showcases several iconic images:

George Tames/The New York Times

J.F.K. in the Oval. George Tames’s famous photo shows President John F. Kennedy from the back, in silhouette and leaning on his desk in 1961. It appears to be “a moment of tense solitude,” as Anika puts it, a window into “the pressures of the presidency.” But the contact sheet also includes shots from the side that show Kennedy’s face and a more workaday moment of him merely looking down at some papers. “Was the photographer cheating us?” one reader asked in the comments.

New York City The New York Times

Vampire Weekend. Neal Boenzi went to the Empire State Building one November day in 1966 to shoot what the next day’s front page described as “islands in a sea of smog.” The image had a long afterlife, gracing the cover of the 2013 indie rock album “Modern Vampires of the City.” The contact sheet essentially shows dozens of versions of the same frame with different exposure times.

Barbra Streisand John Orris/The New York Times

“Funny Girl.” A 1964 portrait shows Barbra Streisand putting on eye makeup in her dressing room. The contact sheet adds other angles and ideas: there’s a shot of her wardrobe, one showing two women standing in the doorway and three that include the photographer himself, John Orris, looking over her shoulder in the mirror.

“With contact sheets,” Anika concludes, “it’s these details that keep us looking.”

Check out the contact sheets here.