There are two wonderful components to “Looking Back from Ground Zero: Images from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.” The first is a dozen or so photographs by Berenice Abbott from her “Changing New York” project. The second is twice as many photographs by G.N. Miller that were taken on September 11 and September 12, 2001. The first documents the site of the World Trade Center as it was in the 1930s, and the second dramatically recalls the fiery destruction of the twin towers.

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) returned to New York City from Paris in the wake of the Great War, found digs in Greenwich Village, and set about photographing the city. Her inspiration was the great Eugène Atget, who had documented the architecture of medieval Paris as much of it was disappearing. Abbott sought to preserve the parts of New York that were going, or likely to go, and her work — funded by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York — remains a valuable record of the city in its perpetual act of transformation. What most distinguishes her work is her clarity of purpose: She knew what she was about.

Abbott was thrilled by the modern skyscrapers that were changing the profile of Manhattan, but she also had a feeling for the older, low-rise buildings, with their patina of age and decay. These figure prominently in the pictures she took of the periphery of Lower Manhattan when that part of the city was still an important seaport. “Ferry, Central Railroad of New Jersey”(1938), a black-and-white silver gelatin print, like all her works here, shows the façade of the terminal with its classical columns and window treatments, the clock with Roman numerals that makes the roofline bow up, and the peeling paint. The left side of the picture is occupied by a pedestrian bridge that thrusts its way overhead across the street, an ancestor of the present bridges over West Street. The elegant taxis look far more comfortable than what we make do with nowadays.

“Dey Street between West and Washington Streets” (1938) is a ground-level shot of a row of slightly dilapidated four- and five-story red brick buildings, many of which housed trucking companies. Abbott accords them the dignity due those who work for a living. But “Water Front: From Roof of Irving Trust Co. Building” (1938) looks down from a great height on the shorter buildings being crowded to the water’s edge. The tall buildings are emblematic of modernity; the tiny structures would be razed 30 years later to make way for the World Trade Center.

The calm of Abbott’s well-ordered streetscapes is in marked contrast with the hellish chaos of G.N. Miller’s record of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Miller (b. 1958) worked as a Brooklyn South narcotics detective before becoming a photojournalist for the New York Post. On September 11, he returned home after dropping his daughter Genna off at school and saw the first tower being hit on television. He got in his car, headed down the FDR, and over the course of the next 48 hours took some of the most memorable pictures of those days’ havoc and heroism.They are presented as medium format black-and-white silver gelatin prints.

The names Mr. Miller chose for his pictures almost all have religious connotations: “Golgotha,” “Here Are My Servants,” “Transfiguration,” “A Day of Atonement,” “Gethsemane,” “Redeemers,” “Guarding the Tomb.” The names speak to the depth of his feeling for what he was compelled to record, how like an apocalypse ground zero was on that day. Several pictures show freestanding chunks of the steel façade emerging from the smoke and rubble, and it is not surprising that so many people interpreted them as sacred glyphs. Barbara Head Millstein, a redoubtable former curator of photography at the Brooklyn Museum, realized the importance of Mr. Miller’s photographs when she saw them soon after they were taken, and immediately purchased many for the museum’s collection.

“Resurrection Within” is one of the pictures of elements of the façade against a backdrop of fire and smoke: It is framed by a building that is still standing, and the contrast makes the disappearance of the rest of the World Trade Center all the more inexplicable. “An Unknown Soldier” is a portrait of a fireman, not young, momentarily at rest: There is something uncomprehending about his expression, as if he cannot quite absorb the immensity of what he is engaged in. “Men of Stone” shows a phalanx of soot-covered firemen standing behind a pile of spent oxygen tanks. “The Morning After” depicts a pair of men’s shoes, somehow left beside the Wall Street entrance to the East Side IRT. “The Blessing” shows a bit of graffiti on a battered wall, reading “God Bless America.”

Abbott and Mr. Miller are what is best about “Looking Back.” There are other pictures and art objects, and in the middle of the exhibition is a continuous 18-minute movie about the construction of the World Trade Center that the Port Authority had made in 1983. It is not as interesting as a documentary I recently saw about the construction of the Empire State Building, and the background music — sprightly waltzes — can be heard throughout the exhibition space.The ballroom music is irrelevant to Abbott’s photographs, and positively weird, almost blasphemous, when viewing Mr. Miller’s.

The introductory wall text to the exhibition begins, “On September 11, 2001, two airplanes hijacked by terrorists slammed into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center …” There is a later wall text that refers to “the terrorist attacks.” Why are these terrorists anonymous? They were Muslims, controlled by Al Qaeda, intent on jihad. It is piquant that an institution willing to offend Christians with an exhibition of elephant dung on the Virgin Mary is constrained by political correctness from identifying the people responsible for the slaughter being commemorated. Or maybe it is fear.

The last section of “Looking Back” is “Images From the Brooklyn Museum Library.” Typical is “Patriot Alphabet” by Karen Hammer. A is for Axis of Evil; B, Dirty Bomb; C, Enemy Combatants; D, Detainees; E, Evil Doers; F, Fingerprints; G, Guantanamo; H, Haliburton; I, Imperialism. You get the idea. There is no mention of the men and women who have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq to protect us from further attacks. There is no context: The Brooklyn Museum understands ground zero as a real estate deal and a photo op.

Until January 7 (200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).