Traditional landscape photos succeed on their ability to trigger memories of light and air texture that in turn translate into a recognition of place, weather, or time of day. Less traditional landscapes rely on manipulating the familiar into something less familiar — a snippet of natural reality abstracted to define textures or patterns or motion that startle the viewer into apprehending a connection between the subject and the camera’s way of seeing. The Museum of Fine Arts’ 80-some-print " Lens Landscapes " exhibit, in the Trustman Gallery through February 23, offers examples of both approaches, and they’re arranged by content (water, clouds, trees, etc.) so that various photographers’ styles are juxtaposed and you’re kept actively involved with the display.

Organized by MFA curator of photographs Anne Havinga, ÒLens LandscapesÓ draws its works primarily from the museum’s own collection, an inexpensive way to fill a gallery. But this no quick-and-dirty effort. In fact, the eclecticism that comes from scavenging prints from a limited but disparate pool works in the show’s favor, giving exposure to a wide and satisfying range of eras and styles. The establishing shot (though unfortunately the exhibit spills out into the hallway, so it has no real beginning) is a large-format untitled work that at first glance looks like a picture of the dawn of time taken at the dawn of time. It turns out that this is a faux antique (toned with tea) shot made by Sally Mann in 1998 using a view camera with an ancient (and flawed) lens and reviving the 19th-century glass-plate wet process. To the extent that any one photo can speak for this show, Mann’s does by bridging the centuries, calling attention to technique, and emphasizing that in photography some degree of manipulation lurks behind verisimilitude.

Not that ÒLens LandscapesÓ really needs a unifying concept. This is a survey show in the truest sense, with prints dating from the mid 19th century through the 1990s and spanning approaches to landscape photography from the direct to the oblique. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable show, and you can have fun noting broad and subtle contrasts and parallels among the works, within and across their subject-themed groupings.

Perhaps the most traditional print is Henry Hamilton Bennett’s circa 1890 River Landscape: Inkstand; Harriet and John Bennett in Canoe, Nellie on Shore, one of a handful of shots in the exhibit that includes human figures — a couple in a canoe dwarfed by sky, water, and shore. It makes a typical late-19th-century statement: human figures rendered insignificant by the boundless American landscape. Not far to its right hangs Boston photographer David Mussina’s 1986 Inferno Cone, a non-traditional composition that, all but filled with a black volcanic dome at Craters of the Moon National Monument, in Idaho, shows tiny figures of tourists bound for the summit. The two prints share basic elements but send remarkably different messages. Bennett’s human figures occupy the foreground, diminished but undaunted by nature. Mussina’s climbers are distant, still headed for the ominous top, perhaps, but clearly having had to come a long way.

A completely different take on the man-versus-nature theme can be found in the hall outside the Trustman Gallery — Roger Kingston’s 1983 large-format color photo Monument Valley. Here a shirtless figure looms large in the foreground, back to the viewer, standing before a low wall and staring out at a surreal-in-context landscape of mesas framed by the edges of some sort of porch structure. Nature is completely contained by its human intruder, who gazes at it as if it were a museum diorama.

But with the majority of prints in ÒLens Landscapes,Ó the issue is not man and nature but nature and photography. Early works — Alvin Langdon Coburn’s memorable view of Yosemite Falls (1911), ƒdouard-Denis Baldus’s eccentric Le pont de la sainte (1854), Frank Jay Haynes’s powerful Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Falls and dramatic Cinnabar Mountain, Devil’s Slide (both dated 1880–1900) — either echo contemporary rural painting or serve as majestic documents devoid of much intentional interpretation. A turning point of sorts is Alfred Stieglitz’s 1933 Lilac Bushes with Grass, Lake George, a deceptively drab silver print that introduces the idea of stratified perspective: dry grass near, bushes middle, and mountains far. It’s a composition upon which other landscape photographers would build through the 20th century. You can see it in the wide-perspective extreme in Ansel Adams’s landmark Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941) and in subtle, almost ironic, variation in Lee Friedlander’s 1977 Honolulu, where the near field is filled with a peacock’s fan. It’s an obvious and seemingly unavoidable compositional idea to present nature as receding layers of water, flora, land masses, and sky, but compare Adams’s Moonrise or the nearby Waning Moon, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts (1997) by Worcester’s Stephen DiRado to, say, George Barker’s 1880s view of Niagara Falls and you’ll realize that the ¾sthetic was, at some point, an innovation. And nowhere is that ¾sthetic more integrated than in the abstracted-detail shots by the early-to-mid-20th-century photographers of the American West.

Whereas 19th-century photographers celebrated nature by capturing it whole, later photo artists often used landscapes as raw materials from which to isolate patterns and designs — seeing (and, though some would deny it, interpreting) nature through their cameras. Classic examples abound in ÒLens LandscapesÓ — Edward Weston’s 1938 Dunes, Death Valley and two examples of Adams’s Surf Sequence (1940) — but the show also includes several prints by the freer-eyed Paul Strand and rarer treats like Emmet Gowin’s damply evocative Earth Bank, Danville, Virginia (1971). (For some reason, Minor White, zen-master champion of the nature-inspired abstract, is not represented.)

Modern examples of taking abstraction from nature to extremes can be found in two 1990 Hiuroshi Sugimoto minimalist seascapes, in which the frames are filled with horizonless oceans, one presumably shrouded in fog. Toshio Shibata’s Grand Coulee Dam, Douglas County, WA (1996), the large-format counterpoint to Sally Mann’s vintage re-creation in the foyer, takes a plunging down-the-dam-face view and renders it more dramatic by tight cropping that obscures the setting.

Most of the photographs in ÒLens LandscapesÓ have as much to do with art and the camera as with documentation (sometimes more). Some, though not many, do aspire to make larger statements: Bruno Requillart’s 1974 La haie (The Boundary) is an end view of a thick stone wall dividing a manicured, misty tree-lined road from an apparently sunlit scrub field; and Jerry Uelsmann’s darkroom-invented landscape Ritual Ground is fraught with symbolic imagery. But for the most part, ÒLens LandscapesÓ offers a survey of pure photography. It can be seen as an art-history lesson or a pantheistic poem. Either way, it’s impossible to dislike.