In addition to the history of photography, there is the history of the history of photography; that is, the story of how the story gets rewritten as lost images are rediscovered, as new information is found about early practitioners and their public, and as our understanding of the periods in which developments took place changes. It also matters if the one telling the story is primarily interested in data and narrative, is a Marxist looking for examples of class differentiation, or is a follower of Michel Foucault darkening the account with philosobabble. In any telling, however, the major “events” to be dealt with will be images, and under any scenario, the more images that are available, the more comprehensive the story will be.

“Master Photographs From the Gilman Collection: A Landmark Acquisition” is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s way to let the public feel its way through the early years of photography by seeing works from its new treasure trove. The Museum announced last March that it had acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection of more than 8,500 pictures. As the press release at the time said, “the Gilman Collection has played a central role in establishing photography’s historical canon.” We know from the controversies that rage over the literary canon that this is a magisterial prerogative. No one doubts that innumerable daguerreotypes, paper negative photographs, glass-plate photographs, and other early pictures that have been lost would change our understanding of photography in the 19th century, were they still extant. Yet we must be grateful to the late Howard Gilman and Pierre Apraxine, his curator, for having saved what they did. Many histories will be spun from the works they brought together.

In addition to the 30-odd pictures from France in the Howard Gilman Gallery under review here, pictures from the collection are currently on display at the Met in “All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-60,” and in the corridor on the second floor leading through the print and photography rooms. Yet there are many more than 30 pictures here if you count the 27 portraits in “Anarchists,” (1893-94), separately rather than as one work. The pictures – mug shots – are ascribed to Alphonse Bertillon (1854-1914), the director of the Identification Bureau of the Paris Prefecture of Police.

One of the histories of photography involves its use for intelligence: It begins with Communards who were identified and tried on the basis of pictures that showed them at the barricades in 1848 and continues with the mystery surrounding the American high-altitude photo-reconnaissance aircraft that crashed this last week somewhere over Asia. The pictures of 22 male and five female anarchists are purely documentary, not meant for aesthetic evaluation, but they come from all over Europe and so seem representative of the background characters in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” Henry James’s “The Princess Cassimassima,” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed.” We read their faces into the novels, but also read the novels into their faces, searching for hints of incipient chaos, nihilism, and purblind idealism. The pictures then become part of an illustrated fin de siecle social history.

Three coordinates determine which history or histories a specific photograph may find itself in: Its place in the line of technological development, its social background, and its maker. That is, what the photographer was physically capable of doing, what he was expected to do, and what he wanted to do. For instance, “The Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens, Paris” (1849), by Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat, (1815-1858), shows the daguerreotype’s startling capacity for detail: little ittybitty details in the facade of the Louvre and in the leaves of the trees can be seen only with a magnifying glass. “The Juggler Manoel” (1861), by by Andre-Adolphe-Eugene Disderi, (1819-1890), shows four carte-de-visite portraits that are albumen silver prints from a glass negative. The carte-de-visite was an immensely popular social accessory not just because technologies for multiple images and multiple prints made them possible, but because a broad segment of the public felt a need for them and had the wherewithal to pay.

Finally, we look to see what the most talented makers – the artists – were able to accomplish, how they learned to use the medium in their own manners and occasionally for their own ends. Most visitors to the Gallery will experience the pictures this way, as individual works of art, not as part of historical continua. So I took great delight in the portrait by Nadar (Felix Tournachon, 1820-1910) of Alexandre Dumas. That it is a salted paper print from a glass negative is interesting. But it also reminded me of when I still had my child’s card to the Rochambeau branch of the Providence Public Library and went through book after book following Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan as they tangled with Cardinal Richelieu, Milady, the Vicomte de Bragelonne, and other slime, until those brave musketeers met their wrenchingly sorrowful deaths. Nadar’s picture is for sure the guy who wrote that stuff.

Nadar and Dumas had been friends for decades at the time the picture was taken, so the novelist is relaxed in front of the camera. Nadar has lit the portly writer to give a sense of his heft, his physical being, yet the lighting is soft enough to catch details of his face, hair, and clothing. But mostly – and this is what Nadar was famous for, in his own time and now – he has found a way for Dumas to open himself to us. We see he is a clever man, intelligent but with a quick sense of humor, sensual but not vulgar, creative, a lover of life, a good companion. We have a sense of who Dumas is beyond the particulars of biography: It is the gift photography makes available to us across the gap of a century and a half.

Photography is abandoning silver and rushing into a digitalized future of ever-increasing mega pixels. It is important that the Gilman photographs be available, so the public will know photography had a past and can savor the individual works it fancies. The collection will keep scholars busy indefinitely as they write and rewrite its histories, trying to explain once and for all how we got from there to wherever it is we are now.

Until September 6 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).