Aspiring curators demonstrate a collector's eye

At Yale, students choose the images that make up an exhibition from Doris Bry's collection

Irving Penn's ''Harlequin Dress - Lisa Fonssagrives Penn'' is among 75 photographs on display in ''From Any Angle.''

NEW HAVEN - Photography as a process cannot exist without the camera. Photography as an art form cannot exist without the photographer. And photography as a sustainable art form cannot exist without the collector.

Collectors' motives are as varied as the size of their acquisitions budget. They can be driven by ego, aesthetic passion, investment considerations, even the pressure of too much empty wall space.

All good collectors have one thing in common, though: an eye. The Yale University Art Gallery's "From Any Angle: Photographs From the Collection of Doris Bry" testifies to the quality of hers.

Bry was a friend of Georgia O'Keeffe's and for many years her agent. She met O'Keeffe soon after the death of the painter's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and assisted her in putting together donations of his work to various institutions. Among them was the Museum of Fine Arts, which eventually led to Bry's 1965 book, "Alfred Stieglitz, Photographer."

A love of photography, like photography itself, is rarely systematic. Bry acknowledges as much, calling the more than 250 photographs she has acquired over the years her "Inadvertent Collection."

Now on long-term loan to Yale, the collection may be inadvertent, but that doesn't mean scattershot or impersonal. The 75 images that nine student curators have chosen for "From Any Angle" suggest recurrent thematic and technical concerns on Bry's part. Like any good sensibility, Bry's betrays affinities but not limitations. That isn't to say they might not be there (even God created the mosquito). It's just that we can't see them.

Bry has had a longstanding interest in printing and the variety of formats that make up photography. In addition to silver gelatin and albumen prints, "From Any Angle" includes platinum and palladium prints, gravures, a color Polaroid, a carbon print, even a platinum-palladium print mounted on aluminum (Irving Penn's bravura "Harlequin Dress - Lisa Fonssagrives Penn").

Related to printing and format is an alertness to texture. Photographs uniformly depend on light, which is itself not uniform. Laura Gilpin's "Shiprock From the North Rim of Mesa Verde" and Paul Strand's 1929 portrait of Stieglitz are both silver gelatin prints, and only three years separate them. Yet so greatly do they differ in texture they almost seem to spring from discrete media.

In photography, content usually trumps form - and both invariably trump format. Bry's collection reminds us that the how of photography (the type of picture) is no more monolithic than its what (the subject shown).

Bry clearly favors certain photographers. William Clift has six images in the show; Strand, Gilpin, Ralph Steiner, and Lotte Jacobi five. As Clift's prominence might suggest, Bry hasn't just collected famous names. There's even a photograph she took, the rather lovely "Tree across the River, Autumn."

Trees recur throughout the show, as do photographs with a mystical or indwelling aspect, and images of the American Southwest (recall the O'Keeffe connection). Women photographers are well represented, too. Besides Gilpin, Jacobi, and Bry, they include Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Chris Enos, and Lilo Raymond.

The exhibition is the third in an ongoing series at Yale curated by students, mostly undergraduates. Like Bry, the students have impressive eyes. The hanging of the show is full of happy linkages.

There are, for example, the complementary textures, of Penn's "Camel Pack" and the adjoining "Genese (Genesis)," by Lucien Clergue. Two of the most famous images in American photographic history, Strand's "Wall Street" and Abbott's "Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8," are juxtaposed to splendid effect. True, they're the same city, and a distance of only a few miles separates their locales - but so do two decades and a world of attitudes and comforts. Visually their kinship is striking: similarly angled approaches, an almost-sculptural use of shadow, the way they endow the urban scene with a sense of monumentality through sheer architectural mass. Yet who previously noticed? Just as Bry knew what she was doing in buying them, these aspiring curators know what they're doing in joining them.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.