Like Instagram influencers who only post seemingly effortless picture-perfect shots, mid-20th century photographers rarely exposed their blooper reels, also known as contact sheets. Contact sheets ...

In the days before digital a contact sheet was one of the most important working documents for a photographer. The multi-image sheets get their name from the way in which they’re created: The ...

In the bygone age of analog photography, contact sheets, or proofs, were like a reporter’s notebooks or a poet’s first drafts. Direct prints of exposed negative films that had been cut into strips and ...

Before digital photography took over, contact sheets revealed the options for picking the perfect picture. An exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art called “PROOF: Photography in the Era of the ...

In New York three museums have brought the contact sheet, once the photographer's secret rough draft, out of the closet. Maybe it's a case of longing for the obsolete, a hunger for something analogue ...

Director's foreword / William M. Griswold -- Acknowledgments -- Preface / Fred Bidwell -- Parting the curtain / Peter Galassi -- Plates -- Hunting -- Choosing ...