Some photographs are as iconic as the people they capture. It’s hard, for instance, to not think of Jim Morrison without picturing him gaunt, shirtless and stoic as Joel Brodsky immortalized him in 1967 for his “American Poet” shot, or to even imagine Lee Harvey Oswald not forever frozen in pain thanks to Jack Ruby’s bullet catching him mid-perp walk in Robert Jackson’s Pulitzer-winning news footage of that fateful day in Dallas.

But what about the photos taken during those same shoots that aren’t as famous? Los Angeles’ Fahey/Klein Gallery is celebrating both with its latest exhibit, Contact. Running through January 28, the showcase displays contact sheets for some of the most memorable shoots in fashion, pop culture, and history next to large-scale renderings of the final results. Aside from Brodsky and Jackson’s works, there are glimpses into Herb Ritts’ OCD-like attention to detail as he obsesses over slight differences in photos of the back of a model in a Versace dress for his “El Mirage” project in 1990 and also into how controlling Marilyn Monroe was of her own image after a photo shoot with Lawrence Schiller (she used a red marker to veto all but two photographs—one of which didn’t even show her face).

“People have done contact sheet shows before, but they were oversized contact sheets so you could see the whole shoot,” Fahey/Klein Gallery gallery owner David Fahey says. “What I like about this show is we try to select iconic photographs and then we try to find the contact sheet related to it, so you’re looking at the little teeny image that this massive, oversized print came from. You can see the evolution of the shoot and the final big print. I just like the idea of the little thing and the big thing.”

He says the choice in photographs was an “exhibition that grew out of our ability to locate things quickly,” as contact sheets tend to be owned by different people or corporations and his gallery staff usually only has weeks to prepare for each showcase. A fan of photojournalism, Fahey has placed the Oswald photograph near Stephen Somerstein’s photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama, telling the stories behind two of the most important photographs of America in the 1960s. (He adds that it was just a coincidence that Phil Stern’s photographs of Frank Sinatra and an out-of-focus John F. Kennedy on the latter’s presidential inauguration night are across the room from Oswald.)

“When we sequence the show, it’s really based on formal issues: how it looks on the wall and how the shapes work,” Fahey says. “And, secondarily, we try to combine thematic things and images from the same period that represent the same kind of idea.”

Fahey says he doesn’t mind that the exhibit is “a mixed group” of genres of celebrity. He cites one of the items—William Claxton’s capturing of fashion model Peggy Moffitt wearing Rudi Gernreich’s infamous Monokini—as a “classic,” but knows that not everyone may think so. He also likes the “subtle differences” in Julian Wasser’s photographs of Joan Didion, which are also on display, adding that “with all of the people in those images, it’s so much to with what they want to project; that unguarded moment that is acceptable but is also authentic.”

Selma to Montgomery March

“I like the fact that pictures become famous for different reasons; they connect with people and there’s a reason for it,” Fahey says. “It’s kind of like a golden moment that people can relate to at different levels. They may not like the photographer’s work, but [it’s] that single picture that connects. So many people, so many photographers, if they’re lucky make a great single picture and then they work their whole career trying to do other pictures.”

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For all the good technology has done in allowing us to photograph and record pretty much everything, it has also chipped away at something else: our ability to look back on our lives with rosey hued nostalgia. When our memories can be so easily archived and accessed, what do we lose?

This idea was one of the many that fascinated curator Claire C. Carter when she was organizing the exhibit, I Remember Not Remembering, which runs from February 11 to April 30 at the Scottsdale, Ariz. Museum of Contemporary Art.

“So much of this work is autobiographical; the artists often interrogate the works themselves, asking ‘is this something I remember or do I remember looking at the photograph and have built my story around this picture?,’ Carter explains. “This brings up the larger question of what are our intentions when we record our lives?”

The exhibition of 12 installations features both photos and videos by a group of artists from varying backgrounds. Los Angeles-based filmmaker Kahlil Joseph juxtaposes snapshots and family videos of the city’s Compton neighborhood with images of what that community looks like a couple decades after its 1992 race riots. Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Road Trip is a computer-controlled slide projector that chronicles his grandfather’s journey from Alberta, Canada to New York City to receive cancer treatment. Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada’s I Shot Him Nine Times is actually a collection of photographs she took of the man believed to be responsible for her grandfather’s death.

Carter says it was important to curate from artists from around the globe because “all of the works are both so personal and universal at the same time. They reveal a lot about the social cues and the political context of the time in which they were made.”

In fact, the exhibit’s name actually comes from husband and wife team Adriana Trujillo and José Inerzia’s presentation of how their own family histories mixed with the political and social transitions in 1970s Mexico.

The soundtrack is Trujillo “telling this story of her mother and her childhood that is woven both from her memories and from this video,” Carter explains. “It’s a very meta narration over this beautiful film work. It goes into larger questions about existence and who we are and how we tell the stories of ourselves looking backward.”

Carter muses that “it will be really interesting to see young kids come in [to the exhibit] who don’t know what [photographic] negatives are.” She says she suspects that, qualitatively speaking, we still value home movies and pictures; there is just so much of them to sort through now—and they are almost inescapable.

Younger generations may have a more challenging time when it comes to going back through old images and being reflective—a searchable database provokes thoughtfulness in a very different way than physical slides and reels of film does. “You can imagine these artists sitting on the floor and physically moving these things around and then stopping and watching them and then going back and making their creation,” Carter says. “That is a really different thing than going through your computer and looking for digital files.”

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