"War/Photography," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston AS a form of photojournalism, war photography can sometimes seem to be telling the same story over and over across conflicts and eras. But as technology has grown more sophisticated, photojournalists have been able to bring us ever closer to its daily realities and to offer new ways of understanding the experience of those who live through it. That's one lesson of "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath," now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through Feb. 3. The idea for the show began brewing 10 years ago, when the museum acquired what is believed to be the first print of Joe Rosenthal's famous 1945 photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima - a small, sepia-tone image with, surprisingly, "no bravado," said Will Michels, a photographer who works for the museum. He had previously spent years photographing and interviewing veterans who had "personally shelled the beach in order to make that flag raising possible," he said. That's why it resonated with me. The print prompted Mr. Michels to ask Anne Wilkes Tucker, the museum's curator of photography, why she wasn't collecting war photographs. Buoyed by his enthusiasm and expertise, she decided to undertake an extensive research project, one that would take the colleagues to sites as far afield as the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow, the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, and military archives from Ottawa to South Korea. The exhibition they organized, together with Ms. Tucker's curatorial assistant, Natalie Zelt, comprises about 500 objects, including cameras, ephemera and nearly 400 photographs, roughly a third of which come from the museum's own newly built war photography collection. Much of the rest was borrowed from museums and public collections around the world. But some came from individuals, like the 1940s photograph of Russian children gathered around the corpses of two others who have just been hanged as collaborators, or a 1937 snapshot of Japanese soldiers using live Chinese soldiers for bayonet practice. "We have some pretty horrific images," Ms. Tucker said, "that wouldn't be published in a newspaper." And few artmuseums collect or show photographs of atrocities. But war photographs, like the events they document, are part of the "collective memory," she added, and "we decided that this was going to be about what photographers have photographed during wartime," no holds barred. Felice Beato Interior of the Angle of North Fort, Immediately After the Capture, Aug. 21, 1860 Early war photography was a cumbersome, time consuming and highly visible business, typically requiring a large-format camera, a tripod and dozens of glass plates, as well as chemicals and water. "You needed mules or vans or wagons," Ms. Tucker said. And you had to be able to make the negative on the spot. Roger Fenton, the first major combat photographer, covered the Crimean War, traveling with a wine merchant's van that doubled as his darkroom. Photographers couldn't start working until the firing stopped. Thus most 19th-century war pictures depict the battle's aftermath or other scenes, like medical stations, that were "relatively unfatal to the photographer," she said. Among the earliest to capture more graphic subjects was the Italian-born commercial photographer Felice Beato, who also photographed the Crimean War, among others. The picture here - the first known photograph of enemy corpses on a battlefield - was taken at the Taku Forts in northeastern China during the Second Opium War. Beato, traveling with British troops, happened upon the scene soon after the forts had been captured. According to a contemporary report, he called the scene "beautiful" and begged to be given time to immortalize it before the bodies were cleared away. Capt. Alfred G. Buckham Full Speed Ahead, 1918 World War I was the first conflict that had official combat photographers serving in the armed forces. And by its start two inventions had radically opened up the possibilities for war photography: smaller, nimbler, hand-held cameras; and the airplane, which offered a new perspective. Some of the earliest aerial war pictures were made by Edward Steichen, the first director of the United States Army School of Aerial Photography. In 1918 he undertook a reconnaissance mission to photograph the ruined village of Vaux in France, thereby aiding its recapture by American forces. Steichen's British equivalent was Capt. Alfred G. Buckham, who served in the Royal Naval Air Service. Like most great combat photographers Buckham was a daredevil who tweaked the technology of the time to his own ends. The British military used semiautomatic aerial cameras affixed to planes, the better to withstand the grueling conditions of flight. But Buckham favored a large-format press camera, which he steadied by bolstering the bellows with cardboard and strapping his own legs to the seat. Although many photographers had adopted plastic film by then, Buckham, like the rest of the British military's photography corps, used glass plates. Buckham also had no qualms about using parts of different negatives to create a photograph, as he likely did for this one, of a floatplane near a ship. People had been collaging and layering images to make great pictures since the invention of photography, Mr. Michels said, and Buckham's technique "was a common practice." However, he added, Buckham did it much better than many others. That's one reason why his clouds are always perfect. Georgi Zelma Captured Building, Stalingrad, 1942