The Morning: Vintage photography
The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
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2025-09-01 13:02
Good morning, and Happy Labor Day. Here’s the latest:
More news is below. But first, we look at excellent photography from The Times’s archives.
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.
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:
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.
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.
“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.
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Other Big Stories
Since the fall of affirmative action in university admissions, some students now feel compelled to emphasize their race in their college essays, Justin Driver writes. A fair justice system shouldn’t detain accused people as a default before their trial. We must pursue bail reform, Jeremy Cherson and David Gaspar write. Here are columns by David French on Cracker Barrel’s logo and Margaret Renkl on a great bird roost in Nashville. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
Wellness: In Austria, government health care can look a bit like a spa. “States of Elevation”: He wants to climb nearly all of America’s tallest peaks — in a month. Fentanyl: After a woman lost her son to an overdose, she went on a quest to hold someone accountable for his death. National parks: Trump shrank staffing. See how many of the parks are struggling. Ask Vanessa: “Why are everyone’s bra straps showing?” Your pick: The most-clicked story in The Morning yesterday was about a hiker who went missing in Wyoming and was found dead. Trending: On Google yesterday, more than a half-million people asked: “What is Labor Day?” We explain here. Metropolitan Diary: The curious vegetarian. Émigré press: Zdena Salivarova, a Czech publisher and writer, is dead at 91. In exile in Canada, she published books that had been outlawed by the Soviet-backed Communist regime.
U.S. Open: Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka are into the quarterfinals. Taylor Fritz and Carlos Alcaraz also advanced, while Taylor Townsend fell in a three-set thriller. College football: Miami beat Notre Dame with a late field goal. Read takeaways from Week 1 of the season. M.L.B.: Two Guardians pitchers’ suspensions have been extended “until further notice” while the league continues its sports betting investigation into the players.
China’s most popular summer movies are about fighting Japan during World War II. In movie theaters, people are standing and singing the national anthem, and children are crying. The films — part entertainment, part propaganda — are part of an effort by the ruling Communist Party to rally the nation as its economy slows. Read more about the trend. More on culture
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