Vikki Tobak’s new book, “Contact High,” is a wondrous tribute to the way hip-hop overturned not just the sound of culture but also ways of seeing. Tobak worked in the music industry and as a journalist throughout the nineties, experiences that gave her an insider perspective on the culture’s rise. Throughout “Contact High,” Tobak and some of hip-hop’s greatest photographers return to their old contact sheets, scrutinizing all the other, considerably less famous pictures they took on their way to images that became iconic. There’s something thrilling about seeing Michael Lavine’s outtake versions of OutKast’s “Stankonia” cover, where André 3000 has his hands up rather than pointed toward the viewer in a hex, or alternate versions of Danny Clinch’s famed portrait of a shirtless Tupac and his “Thug Life” tattoo, where he’s looking down at the ground with a measure of peace, rather than toward the sky or directly at the viewer in defiance. These images are like portals into alternate time lines. There’s a lone photo of the Notorious B.I.G., wearing a crown and grinning, surrounded by a dozen versions of him flashing a tragic scowl. The crown was the photographer Barron Claiborne’s idea, meant to evoke Biggie as the king of New York. Biggie’s close friend and producer, Sean “Puffy” Combs, feared that it made him look like the Burger King.

Redman, “Dare Iz a Darkside,” Newark, New Jersey, 1994. Photograph by Danny Clinch

“Contact High” tells the history of how hip-hop learned to pose in front of the camera. And it gives credit to the photographers for being the ones, more often than not, who were telling the stars how and where to stand. The photographer Joe Conzo, Jr., was “a chubby kid with an Angela Davis afro” whose high-school buddies, the Cold Crush Brothers, were starting to gig outside of their South Bronx neighborhood. His late-seventies images capture the music at its freest, full of young faces in the crowd squealing in delight at seeing people just like them onstage. Martha Cooper, a New York photojournalist, obsessively took photos of dancers and graffiti writers in the early eighties, fearful that this subculture “might disappear” before anyone knew it. An image of the b-boy Frosty Freeze in the middle of his routine feels impossibly still, a blur of twisting, whirling limbs captured in a single, fleeting shot.