WORCESTER -- ''New to View," the Worcester Art Museum's current photography exhibition, has a lot going for it, said David Acton, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs. ''It has beautiful things, interesting things, and they were chosen by a kid."
The ''kid" is Ben Charland, Acton's 27-year-old assistant, who was given free rein to select the pieces for the show from among acquisitions of the last five years.
''As a curator and historian, I can cover a lot of material through photography," Charland said. ''I'm able to explore politics, science, history, architecture, war, love. Personally it's a lot of fun, and I hope [the exhibition] gives others a starting point to enter those fields."
It was Worcester's technical and industrial heritage that led to the museum's early focus on photography, Acton said. As early as 1904 the group that would become the museum's board of trustees -- including businessmen, physicians, and scientists -- expressed interest in the technical aspects of photography and mounted annual shows for hobbyists. These shows soon began to attract entries from all over the country and from some of the nation's photography pioneers, such as Alfred Stieglitz.
It wasn't until the 1960s that the museum began to collect photography, as opposed to just showing it, Acton said. Still, that effort made it one of the first museums in the country to recognize photography as art. The museum's centennial photography exhibition, ''Photography at the Worcester Art Museum: Keeping Shadows," is on national tour.
Among the highlights of ''New to View" are the Surrealist masterpiece ''Le Violon d'Ingres," in which Man Ray decorated his lover's back with the f-holes of a violin; Stieglitz's ''Outward Bound," made on his honeymoon, where the bow of a ship, its railings, and floorboards all fade to a single vanishing point, presaging the Modernist preoccupation with geometry; and Todd Webb's panorama of a New York city block, created by cobbling together eight photographs taken over a period of days.
There are striking nature photographs, such as the Robert Mapplethorpe-like ''Venus Comb" by Seamus Ryan and microscope-enhanced images of an ash tree sprout and rhinoceros horn by Laure Albin Guillot. Diana Dopson, who is legally blind, shows the viewer how she sees butterflies and flowers in soft-focus images mounted in shadow boxes.
Opening March 26 is ''The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993." One of the most prominent and influential American photographers to emerge in the last half-century, Shore is known for his large color images of the urban landscape: gas stations, supermarkets, street scenes, and diner fare.
But photography is not the only reason to visit this handsome museum. For its size, it has an extraordinarily broad collection, some 35,000 pieces of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and new media spanning 5,000 years. The massive Worcester Hunt floor mosaic that greets visitors in the Renaissance Court entrance is just the beginning. Said to be the largest Roman mosaic on view in the country, the still-brilliant tiles depicting a hunt once covered the floor of the reception room of a Roman house in Daphne, a luxurious suburb of Antioch, which was destroyed by an earthquake in AD 526.
An audio tour highlights 16 special pieces, sampling Greek earthenware, Indian bronze casting from the 11th century, a medieval ''chapter house" or priory from 12th-century France, paintings by Monet and Gauguin, portraits by Sargent and Stuart, and 20th-century contemporary American art.
Contact Ellen Albanese at ealbanese@globe.com. 
