America, the community

LEXINGTON -- George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak, played no small role in the history of photography. His estate, in Rochester, N.Y., now contains no small portion of that history. It's home to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

The name may be a mouthful, but Eastman House ranks with the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the Getty Museum as one of the world's great photographic repositories.

The richness of the Eastman House holdings is very much apparent in ''Picturing What Matters," which consists of 126 images taken from the museum's permanent collection. Among the photographers included are Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and W. Eugene Smith, as well as that most prevalent and intriguing name in photographic history, Anonymous.

The show, which runs through May 21, has an unusual background. After 9/11, Eastman House decided to put together an exhibition, drawn from its permanent collection, that both traced the history of American photography and spoke to a larger sense of American community and purpose. The show opened just before the first anniversary of the attacks.

The pictures were chosen by museum staff -- not just curators but also administrators, publicists, and so on. Some of the captions include commentary from the person who chose the image, and the comments are always heartfelt and often touching. At the end of the exhibition, museumgoers are urged to participate by sending in a snapshot or other photo of personal significance for inclusion in the show, and many already have.

The National Heritage Museum is a particularly suitable venue for ''Picturing What Matters," since the show emphasizes America as well as American photography. Unfortunately, the two emphases undercut rather than enhance each other. Rolled-up sleeves and moral uplift are splendid things, but they're at best irrelevant, and at worst inimical, to art. That's especially true when the art is of such quality, as is so often the case here.

Loose and baggy as the concept of ''American photography" is (Mr. Stieglitz, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Warhol), ''America" is that much looser and baggier. Trying to address this, ''Picturing What Matters" groups its images under such headings as ''Family," ''Legacy," and ''The Road," which just makes things worse. The poetry and promise of America wholly elude all such banal, canned categories, a fact underscored by the show's photo captions, in which one encounters such wondrous names as ''Decoy, Kentucky," ''Malheur County, Oregon," and ''Abraham Lincoln."

There's a sense in which ''Picturing What Matters" would work better if the photographs weren't half as good. Unlike illustration, art forces us to think and feel without ever forcing us to think and feel a certain way. A more fitting name for the show might be ''Illustrating What Matters."

That may sound unfair, but consider how Dorothea Lange's ''Migrant Mother" figures in the show. It's first encountered blown up to almost billboard proportions, 8 feet by 6 feet, a gob-smacking vulgarization of a photograph that owes its status as one of the totemic images of the 20th century to the dignity of its subject and the restraint of its photographer. Then it's encountered a few feet away, in another gallery, as a 17-by-14-inch print, all but obliterated by the nearby presence of its swollen twin.

It ought to be noted that ''Picturing What Matters" presents a firm sense of patriotism: celebratory, yes; triumphalist, no. Babe Ruth may sit placidly cradling his bat, but not far away Tommie Smith and John Carlos give the black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics. Martha Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. hang in the ''Icons" section along with the flag being raised on Iwo Jima.

Flag-raising should always predominate over flag-waving, so best to attend to the show's images. The famous ones speak for themselves -- not just ''Migrant Mother" but Lewis Hine's ''Icarus Atop Empire State Building," Aaron Siskind's ''Harlem Dancers," Robert Frank's ''Political Rally -- Chicago," Imogen Cunningham's ''Calla Lilies."

An even greater pleasure comes from seeing less-familiar images from well-known names: the delicacy of Eliot Porter's ''Sangre de Cristo," the moody domesticity of Robert Adams's ''Summer Nights #18," the bull's-eye composition of Stephen Shore's ''Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts." (A major Shore retrospective opens next month at the Worcester Art Museum.)

Few people have understood America as well as D.H. Lawrence, who famously urged in his ''Studies in Classic American Literature" that we trust the tale, not the teller. Well, trust the image, not the interpreter. No amount of wall text, however civic-minded, can match the abiding Americanness of the 36 small Civil War-era images -- tintypes, visiting cards, and such -- that have been framed together and attributed to no known photographer. Seven simple words describe the contents of the frame: ''Soldiers' portraits -- received at Dead Letter office." Their truth goes marching on.

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