Barnes Foundation is exhibiting some of Europe’s earliest photos — the disruptive tech of their day

The first thing visitors see when they enter “From Today, Painting is Dead: Early Photography in Britain and France” is a billboard-size picture of two people in a rowboat on a pond full of water lilies.

It is easy to see why the Barnes would want to start with this, a blowup of Peter Henry Emerson’s 1885 photograph Gathering Water Lilies. Despite its English origin, it has an idyllic, impressionist, late-afternoon leisure about it, so it is an easy fit with the Barnes’ permanent collection.

Moreover, it has a contemporary spontaneity about it, as though you were in the next boat, snapping it on your iPhone, Instagramming it before you reached shore.

This accessible image, though, is a bit misleading because it’s from the tail end of photography’s “early” era. The exhibition, the second one the Barnes has drawn from the outstanding collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg, concentrates mostly on images from the first couple of decades after the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839.

As such, it features the hard-won images of those who were inventing their medium as they went along. It consists of 250 pristine vintage prints and daguerreotypes, including some of the earliest photographs in existence.

Many of these images will strike the viewer as dull or clichéd. A road through a forest, for example, is a tired subject for a photograph. The Road to Chailly, Forest of Fontainebleau (c. 1849) by Gustave Le Gray may not have been the first such picture, but it is early enough in the history of photography that its making and printing required innovation, even if the image looks to contemporary eyes less than spectacular.

The show contains a handful of notable photographs, but it demands viewers patient enough to understand how even those that seem unremarkable chronicle the invention of a new way to see and depict the world.

We are accustomed nowadays to living our lives, snapping promiscuously, preserving memories that will soon be forgotten, images we may never even look at.

It is difficult to imagine how laborious it once was to capture an image — particularly in the half century or so from the medium’s invention to its transformation into a mass pastime with Kodak’s point-and-shoot camera, introduced in 1888.

Being a photographer then required a working knowledge of optics, a fair amount of chemistry, the strength to carry and operate bulky and balky equipment, and the ability to deal with subjects who were not used to staying perfectly still for many minutes at a time.

It took decades of technical experimentation and artistic exploration before a photograph as seemingly fresh and informal as Gathering Water Lilies could be made.

The show’s title is based on an anecdote that even the museum’s own label describes as “far-fetched.” It is what the influential French painter Paul Delaroche is supposed to have said in about 1840, when he first saw a photograph.

He didn’t mean it entirely; he continued to paint. Still, the statement does affirm an understanding that photography was what we would now call a disruptive technology, one whose impact went far beyond the fine arts.

Much of the excitement of early photography came in discovering how it could be used. A lot of the earliest photography dealt with architectural and natural landmarks, which were convenient because they did not move, and which dovetailed with the emergence of the tourism industry at the time.

We also see early studies of motion, prints of leaves, photomicrographs that show, for example, an ordinary flea magnified 1,600 times.

From the Crimean War, we see a battlefield scene of the aftermath of the 1854 conflict described in Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, which a label tells us may be the earliest known example of photojournalism.

The label also tells us that a few of the cannonballs lying around on the ground may have been carried in to enhance the picture. And there is also a photograph of Tennyson and his family — an early moment in the story of celebrity.

There is some early pornography, filling its now-traditional role of helping a technology make money. And there is perhaps the dullest photo in the show, Articles of China (1844) by William Henry Fox Talbot, who a few years before had developed the key innovation in the history of photography, the making of prints from a negative.

In this picture of seemingly random pieces of ceramic, Talbot was demonstrating the usefulness of photography for making inventories of collections or other household items.

And, of course, there are plenty of portraits, including some wonderful examples of daguerreotypes, the earliest successful photographic process. These images are unique, made without negatives. They are captured on a metal plate, but they seem to float in some hazy other world. A gold-decorated 1847 image of a young man by an unknown photographer is, even now, a striking apparition.

Only a few years after the development of photography, photographers such as the Scottish team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson made portraits of characters who seem to have stepped right out of Charles Dickens or Robert Louis Stevenson.

About 20 years later, Julia Margaret Cameron shot portraits, mostly of her aristocratic friends, that have a warmth and character that have rarely been equaled. But when she got her friends to dress up as, say, David and Bathsheba, she traded deep humanism for a Victorian theatricality that looks very dated.

A careful reader of labels and scrutinizer of prints will pick up quite a lot of information and insight at this show. Unfortunately, it is organized around a 19th-century hierarchy of art genres — historical scenes at the top, landscapes pretty low, and still lifes at the bottom — which is largely forgotten today and which the show proves was never relevant to photography in the first place.

Indeed, as in Cameron’s case, those that try hardest to be important and artistic are the hardest to look at.

Because the show is organized by genre, the chronology is a muddle. You need to work hard to see how photography changed, especially during its earliest years, with the development of more portable cameras and faster exposure times.

The Barnes seems to be telling us that the development of photography was a moment in the history of art. It was that, but it was more. It was a revolution in culture and in perception.

Many of the photographs here communicate the difficulty of capturing an image. It must have been miraculous at first — and if you slow down, look, and think, it still is.

ON EXHIBIT

From Today Painting is Dead: Early Photography in Britain and France

Through May 12 at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays–Mondays. (closed Tuesdays).

Admission: $25, adults; $23, seniors; $5 ages 13-18 and students with ID (kids under 13 free).

Information: 215-278-7000 or barnesfoundation.org.