From Combat, Compassion

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

It is there, in each of the photographs. The beauty. And the sorrow. The beautiful far-away stare of a young Israeli woman sitting on her bed. The sorrow of the tan skin suit that protects her badly burned torso. The beautiful joy of a soldier fencing with his sons using plastic light sabers, “Star Wars”-style. The sorrow of the prosthetic leg that extends from his rolled-up blue jeans.

The photographer Ashley Gilbertson was thinking about just those things â€" the beauty and the sorrow â€" when he came upon a picture by Henri Huet at an installation titled “War/Photography” that opened March 23 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.

The photo (Slide 17), shot straight up from the ground, shows a dead American G.I. pulled skyward by a helicopter during the Vietnam War. The lifeless body dangles weightlessly, as if floating in water, below the darkened underbelly of the aircraft, itself hovering beyond time and gravity. For Mr. Gilbertson, whose photographs from both the Iraqi war front and the American home front appear in the show, the picture was unexpectedly riveting.

“It’s horrifying but it’s also beautiful,” Mr. Gilbertson said. “The fact that they had to tie a rope to him is awful. But you can see there is so much sacrifice and dignity â€" which seems a strange word to use. But that really struck me.”

That tension is precisely what the curators were looking for in every photograph in this exhibit: images that could depict the violence, cruelty, fear, destruction and, yes, humanity of war â€" yet still be gorgeous.

“It gets to be a push-pull situation for the viewer,” said Anne Tucker, curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the show originated. “You are horrified and attracted at the same time.”

Or, as Will Michels, the show’s co-curator, put it: “We wanted to make sure that if you pulled the picture out of the exhibit, it was still a good photograph.”

The exhibit, which will move to Washington’s Corcoran Gallery in June and then the Brooklyn Museum in November, includes some of the best-known photographs of war, including Joe Rosenthal’s shot of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima and Eddie Adams’s image of a South Vietnamese police commander executing a Viet Cong operative with a silver revolver.

A long list of all-star conflict photographers is represented, including W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey and Joao Silva, as are photographers whose work is best identified with the aftershocks of war, like Nina Berman and Todd Heisler.

But the curators also included the work of military photographers, the uniformed troops who carry cameras with their rifles and whose photos, no matter how compelling, usually get little recognition. There are even pictures taken by combatants themselves, antigovernment guerrillas and government troops alike, including one by T. E. Lawrence, a k a Lawrence of Arabia.

In one such snapshot, an American soldier bends to trim a tiny patch of grass outside his tent in Iraq, using scissors. His lovingly tended lawn, barely larger than a bathtub, provides the only color in a landscape gray with rock, dirt and canvas. The picture had floated about the Internet for years, its creator and subject unidentified until the curators tracked down both for this show.

The photographs, ranging from the mid-19th century through Afghanistan and the Arab Spring, are grouped by themes reflecting the flow of war itself, starting with the saber-rattling and moving through recruitment, training, daily routines, patrols and troop movement, fighting, death, grief, burials, homecoming and remembrance. Sections on civilians, refugees and children are also included.

Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos Muchachos awaiting a counterattack by the National Guard. Matagalpa, Nicaragua. 1978.

Flipping through the exhibit catalog, it is hard not to make connections, some heartbreaking, some amusing, between images that cross generations and national borders. Al Chang’s famous shot (Slide 5) of an American infantryman in Korea cradling the head of a sobbing comrade, for instance, is eerily, soulfully redolent of Gleb Garanich’s picture of a Georgian man who weeps inconsolably while hugging the body of his dead brother.

“We saw patterns in the grief, in the images of civilians scrounging for food, in the scenes of combat,” Ms. Tucker said. “We saw the same images again and again and again.”

Some images have resonated with audiences in unexpected ways, Ms. Tucker said. She noticed that many younger veterans have congregated around a photograph taken by Damon Winter of The New York Times showing hundreds of combat-ready infantrymen sitting in the cavernous bay of a military transport plane headed to Afghanistan.

It was a scene those veterans knew well, but it was also one any soldier traveling to Europe in the hull of a troop transport ship during World War II might have recognized as well. The technology, in other words, did not notably alter the content or emotion of the photograph.

“The 19th century photos of a guy next to horse is no different than a soldier in World War II standing next to jeep or plane,” Mr. Michels said. “We learned that horse was not an accessory or luxury. It was a piece of equipment.”

A photo from Mr. Gilbertson’s series “Bedrooms of the Fallen,” which is part of a film accompanying the installation, offers a different way of looking at war and its consequences. The series captures the heartbreakingly meticulous ways parents keep the bedrooms of their children, killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, frozen in time, the sports trophies and stuffed animals and rock-star posters as untouched as museum pieces.

Mr. Gilbertson undertook the project because, he said, he felt his photographs from combat zones like Falluja or Sadr City were failing to make emotional connections with civilians who had grown weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I wanted to make something foreign and difficult to identify with understandable,” he said. “This could be your son’s room, or your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s.”

Mr. Michels, himself a photographer, said he became interested in war and veterans issues in the 1990s while working on a project to restore the U.S.S. Texas, a World War I and II-era battleship. When he started working at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, he and Ms. Tucker went through the museum’s collection of war-related photographs and began filling holes with new acquisitions. The seeds of the current exhibit were planted.

For Ms. Tucker, curating the show forced her to think more expansively about war. She realized battlefield medicine did not mean the same thing for insurgents as for conventional armies; or that the concept “home front” could be quite meaningless in places where battle rages just outside the door.

“Our perceptions of the widening circle of the impact of war made me realize: wars don’t end,” she said. “Our fathers’ wars are our wars. Our wars are our children’s wars. The consequences have generations of effects.”

For Mr. Gilbertson, the opening of the show provided an opportunity to reconnect with photographers he had not seen since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago, and many tears were shed.

As he strode through the exhibit for the first time, he said he found himself pondering the obvious: man’s stunning inhumanity toward man. But as he studied and restudied the images, a very different sentiment took root.

“What was surprising was seeing how much compassion and empathy was on the walls,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that. Maybe it put a voice to something I’ve been trying to work out about war. It brings out the absolute worst in us, but also it brings out the best.”

“I was inspired. I remembered why I take photos.”

Dmitri Baltermants/Russian Photo Association, Razumberg Emil Anasovich Grief. Kerch, Crimea, Ukraine. 1942.

Follow @jimdao and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.