"The Lower Yosemite Fall" by Carleton Emmons Watkins.

Morse had seen an early daguerreotype -- now in a Munich museum -- of a Paris street. "You cannot imagine how exquisite the fine detail is," Morse wrote his family. "No painting or engraving could ever touch it." Photography had been born.

A New Englander educated, if somewhat patchily, in the modernized curricula of Phillips Andover Academy and Yale College, Morse had an inkling of how science could move the world. Back in America, he promoted M. Daguerre's invention with such zeal that he became the father of American photography. Five years later, Morse unveiled to the U.S. Congress his own earth-shattering invention: the telegraph.

The exhibition "In Focus: 75 Years of Collecting American Photography" celebrates the museum's 6000-image photography collection, founded in 1934. It is not billed as a tribute to the school's famous alumnus, Samuel F. B. Morse. But it certainly reflects his lasting influence on American culture.

To 19th-century Americans, photography and the telegraph were twin inventions so miraculous they rivaled God's own creation. One represents the world through captured beams of light, the other via bursts of electricity. Together, they underlie the technological wonders that followed them -- from the telephone, radio, and television right through to the digital revolution and the Internet.

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But can a scientific miracle be art? Americans -- more likely to separate art and science than the Europeans -- weren't so sure. London's Victoria and Albert Museum began collecting photographs by the 1860s; American museums hesitated until well into the 20th century. The Addison was among the first to buy American photographs. By then, photography had long been the quintessential American medium -- at home in virtually every street and living room in the nation.

"In Focus" is mostly a display of classics and the self-consciously arty -- an elite, selective survey of a rambling, rambunctious, and class free medium. A lot of people get snubbed. The early 20th-century Pictorialists, whose painting-like photos were often 'not' in focus, receive minimal attention. Also shorted are the vast territories of the amateur snapshot and the workaday worlds of studio portraits, photojournalism, fashion, and advertising. No Richard Avedon, no Irving Penn, no Bruce Weber, no Herb Ritts in this history.

But the show is very far from dull. Perhaps because of their medium's uncertain status, photographers have always been among the most gritty and adventurous of American artists. Edgy, maverick, often downright shocking, America's art photographers are an entertaining tribe. The Addison show brings out their best.

A label by the entrance promises "groupings that create provocative dialogues" instead of chronology. This means that images are grouped by visual theme -- Western landscape or suburbia, for example -- not by decade or school.

It is an inspired approach, made stronger by admirable curatorial restraint. The viewer is never bullied with longwinded explanatory labels that put everything "in context." The curators play the perfect host -- from well in the background. The dialogue is between the photographers and the visitors.

This is a show full of delightful surprises, wry jokes, and majestic gestures. In a small, rather surreal corner dedicated to childhood, Diane Arbus' seriously unsettling "Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C." (1962) confronts Sally Mann's provocative, semi-nude "Jesse at 5" (1987). Nearby, Andre Kertesz' black-gowned "Satiric Dancer" (1926), cheerfully pinwheeled on her couch, hangs over one of E. J. Bellocq's languid New Orleans prostitutes, laid out nude on a chair ("Girl on the Wicker Chaise Lounge, 1912").

In another room, monumental, almost abstract grain elevators by Jack Delano are followed by spooky landscapes from Minor White, Jerry Uelsmann, and Lee Friedlander. Vast western panoramas (the show has a special fondness for panoramic imagery) share space with dreary suburbs, visitor centers, and blankly staring tourists.

When " In Focus" spreads out to explore a grander theme, the effect can be breathtaking. A long section on the American city is a magnificent sequence of streets, skyscrapers, vistas, patterns, and varied urban life forms. New York City, beloved of all true American artists, is abstracted in images by Beaumont Newhall (" Chase National Bank, 1928") and Sol LeWitt (" Manhattan with a Grid, 1975"); particularized by Helen Levitt (" New York 1940"), Berenice Abbott ("Canyon: 46th Street and Lexington Avenue, Looking West," 1946), and Daniel Lyon ("Lower Manhattan," 1966); satirized by Lisette Model ("Running Legs, NYC" 1940") and Charles Harbutt ("Scrivener, Wall St., New York, 1970"). "In Focus" gives photographic abstraction (May Ray, Theodore Roszak, Gyorgy Kepes, Minor White) and the photography of the American West (Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, Ansel Adams) similarly broad, inflected treatments.

The selection does play to certain strengths of the Addison collection. Thus Eadweard Muybridge appears both as the celebrated photographer of arrested movement (in images from "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion," 1881, and "Animal Locomotion," 1887) and also as the lesser-known landscapist of the Yosemite Valley. Andover alumnus Walker Evans is amply represented by images drawn from more than 150 of his photographs in the Addison collection. A broad grouping from Robert Frank's penetrating series, "The Americans" (1955), introduces the exhibition.

Does all this add up to a working definition of American photography? I think so. There is a strong sense of clear design -- and an unflinching directness -- that makes these images both peculiarly American and especially photographic. These photographers look at everything and let nothing get away. They are the bounty hunters of American art. Morse, the old world shaker, would have been pleased.

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