Along the way, he decided that the standard camera for newspaper photographers, the 4x5 Speed Graphic , was too cumbersome , and he began to also use a smaller, 35-millimeter camera. ( Staff photographers, including Falk, also used a Rolleiflex 120 camera.) In a conversation published in 1955, Falk lamented the bulkiness of a large-format camera: “Occasionally I hear press photographers say, ‘Don’t look at the camera.’ They are trying to get that candid-type picture. But how can you possibly get a candid picture with that thing?” With the 35-millimeter, Mr. Silverman said, “you picked it up and nobody knew when you were making a picture or not.”

Falk was one of the first at the paper to experiment with the 35-millimeter format. In addition to enabling more candid photographs , the 35-millimeter could shoot better in available light . The Times’s photo department didn’t have the equipment to process 35-millimeter film, however, so Falk bought a camera and developing tank with his own money . In an interview with Popular Photography in 1981, he remembered being chided: “Why can’t you leave things alone; everybody else is using the Graphic; why do you have to be different?” Falk’s persistence was not misplaced. The Times eventually converted to 35-millimeter cameras and relied on them for decades.

“Camera-wise, I think that really changed the way a photographer could go out and document ,” said Mark Lubell , executive director of the International Center of Photography . “I mean, you could really begin to capture that sort of day-to-day life in a way that technically might not have been possible before. And I think that’s what you see a great deal of in Sam’s work, is the ability to tell a personal story without sort of alerting the subjects.”

In a photograph of dancers taken at a nightclub in 1964, for instance, Falk captured a scene in motion, with moments of velvety definition: the hanging lanterns, the man’s raised arms, the woman’s necklace. The mood is intimate, drawing you closer, and the chasm of time between when Falk pressed the shutter and now is compressed in an instant. You’re there, in the scene.