It’s the dog that didn’t bark. “Photography in the Fine Arts: Museum Directors’ Selections for the 1965 World’s Fair” is an exhibition that was originally seen in Flushing Meadow Park 40 years ago. Virtually all of the 139 photographs shown then are up now – the same prints, the same simple frames, the same groupings – and a large percentage of them are as impressive now as they surely were then. Yet for someone with a sense of the history of photography, the pictures that aren’t there but might have been are just as interesting.

To get to the Queens Museum from the Shea Stadium stop of the 7 train, one passes the site of a time capsule that was buried when the World’s Fair first opened. This exhibit has some of that time capsule spirit. The press kit, for instance, includes a copy of the press release from 1965. It explains that the exhibition, hosted in the Kodak Pavilion, was composed of selections by 11 museum directors from a body of 543 prints in the collection of Photography in the Fine Arts. That collection itself was culled from 3,761 photographs nominated by “authorities on art and photography.” I would like to see the 3,622 prints that did not make the final cut.

Each museum director’s selection is displayed in a separate group with a portrait of the director by Yousuf Karsh and a statement. These, too, have a period flavor. John Walker, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says, “Photography is revealed here in all of its beauty. What a reservoir of visual pleasure the camera offers us, attracting as it has much of the artistic genius if our time!” And James J. Rorimer, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says, “A picture that has a message can be a work of art irrespective of the medium used to produce it, whether it be produced by a painter, a cutter of wood-blocks, an etcher or a photographer. It is the man behind the camera who is the artist.” Nobody speaks that way any more. It is not just that there is no need nowadays to defend photography as an art, the rhetoric is different – not more intelligent, more sensitive, or more profound, but more likely to be blather in an “edgy” key.

The directors picked wonderful photographs. (They got to keep them for their institutions.) There are choice works here by Richard Avedon, Werner Bischof, Esther Bubley, Wynn Bullock, Cornell Capa and Robert Capa, Paul Caponigro, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eliot Elisofon, Andreas Feininger, Burt Glinn, Ernst Haas, and Ken Heyman, to name some from just the first eight letters of the alphabet. The three pictures by Cartier-Bresson are “Children Playing, Seville” (1933), “Eunuch of the Imperial Court, Peking” (1947), and “Matisse and Doves” (1944), beautiful pictures, well known and among his best. But the directors also picked many photographs that now seem banal: the overall ratio is about 55% wonderful to 45% banal.

This was still the era of mass-market photojournalism – Life, Colliers, Look – and the criteria of those magazines were the determining aesthetic. The pictures are in sharp focus, neatly composed, unambiguous. The weaker ones tend to be sentimental and merely pretty, calendar art. Kodak would have anticipated a family audience at its Pavilion, so there is nothing that smacks of the salacious, none of the body parts shown now in Chelsea, where photographs with sexual themes are not so much suggestive as instructional. The one nude is as chaste as the allegorical female sculptures that used to adorn the friezes of public buildings.

William Klein’s “Girl with Flowered Hat” (1956) is the only image that is at all off-color. The hat is one of the silly creations that get shown in fashion magazines. The “girl” appears old enough to have been around; her eyebrows and lashes are heavily made up, her lipstick is dense, and the sideward glance of her eyes, her open mouth, and the curl of smoke from her cigarette combine to give the picture a lascivious cast (although one that is also slightly comic). Irving Penn’s color picture “Broken Egg” is the most sensual image. The close-up of the glistening yellow-orange mass of tumid yoke floating in the clear viscid egg white is boldly physical. But it’s food, nothing the kiddies can’t see.

And sex is not all that is missing. If the show was meant to present the best photography available to prove its bona fides as real art, how can there not be one picture by Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Imogene Cunningham, Berenice Abbott, Harry Callahan, or Paul Strand? Or Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and the whole New York school of photography whose works were already changing the course of photography? The latter’s pictures were frequently grainy, dark, off-kilter, and socially challenging, but the former’s were not. Perhaps it had to do with availability; the Photography in the Fine Arts organization was simply unable to get much of what it wanted, but I expect it was also a matter of taste.

There are probably more great photographs in this exhibit than in any other ever seen on Queens. Many are canonical, such as W. Eugene Smith’s “Woman Weaving” from his classic photo-essay on a Spanish village, or David Seymour’s “Bernard Berenson,” the connoisseur caught appreciating fine sculpture, or Ruth Orkin’s “American Girl in Italy,” a young woman abroad attracting the eyes of every male Roman on the street. And there are pictures I was unfamiliar with that I enjoyed seeing, for instance, H. Landsfoff’s “An American Place, Stieglitz” (circa 1944), which is not as hagiographic as most pictures of the great man are; in fact, he looks a bit like a smaller Capt. Kangaroo.

But it is hard not to imagine the exhibition that with hindsight we would have assembled for the Kodak Pavilion. And it is sobering to realize that the exhibitions that will open in galleries and museums in Manhattan this coming season, if they were sealed away for 40 years and then remounted, would present the same problems.

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Memo to Queens Museum: I stuck my nose in to see the fabulous scale model of New York City, and was distressed that the tiny airplane that used to take off and land at LaGuardia Airport was gone. Bring it back!