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.”