“Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,”

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic. It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself.

This exhibition appropriates a model usually reserved for painters, old or modern masters. Organized by Malcolm Daniels, the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department, “Framing a Century” recounts the medium’s 100 years with a succinct cavalcade of big names, substantial bodies of work and significant historical impact.

The show singles out 13 photographers, representing each with 10 to 16 mostly stunning images. It begins with the innovations of the British gentleman William Henry Fox Talbot, and concludes with the homespun classicism of the American Walker Evans, the studio experiments of Man Ray and, finally, the breathtaking moments captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, geniuses of the street. In between are the landscapes of Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins; portraits by Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron; and views of 19th- and early-20th-century Paris and France by Charles Marville, Édouard Baldus and Eugène Atget.

If this sounds exclusive, it is. Photography, developed by a combination of artists, scientists, businessmen and hobbyists in Britain and France, starting in the late 1830s and early ’40s, has an unusually populous and egalitarian beginning that is a fitting prelude to the images that deluge us today. • http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/arts/design/ http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/05/arts/0606-FRAM_4.html