What constitutes an iconic image in post-9/11 America?

That's one of the questions raised by an exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art that comes clothed as a historical photography survey but is in fact much more because of the circumstances of its origin.

	W. Eugene Smith's "The Walk to Paradise Garden," from 1946, is among 108 images in "Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs from the George Eastman House," at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg. Click photo for larger image.

"Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs from the George Eastman House" debuted at the Rochester, New York, museum on Sept. 11, 2002. The images were chosen from the permanent collection by members of the museum staff, who were invited after the Sept. 11 attacks to select visual representations of something that mattered to them.

The exhibition has been traveling since.

Some of the selections appear to have personal meaning, others communal, and some are both. What "matters" is as diverse as the people doing the choosing.

They begin with 19th-century daguerreotypes and continue into 2001, and include portraiture, landscape, narrative, photojournalism/documentary and still life. Few are negative in nature.

Together they paint a picture of American values at a particular place and time, some of them generalized and some localized. Children are specific individuals, but also representative of everyone's children. The Capitol was in the news in 2001 after it was identified as a possible terrorist target, and a capitol is pictured here -- but it's the one in Albany, closer to home and to heart for these New York state residents.

That the viewer's response is likely to be quite different today than it would have been on the 2002 anniversary, and different yet 10 years from now, suggests something of the mutability of memory, even in the presence of moments that have been permanently frozen on film.

Add to that the variance of interpretation brought by each visitor, and the challenge of arriving at agreed-upon shared recollection becomes evident.

Edward Farber's 1941 "The Flag is Passing By. Citizens Day Rally, Milwaukee," part of "Picturing What Matters." Click photo for larger image.

Yet, throughout time and cultures, select images have risen to the status of iconic, as have many here, eliciting emotional response and codifying something of importance.

Picture, for example, "Old Glory Goes Up Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima," photographer Joe Rosenthal's 1945 portrait of heroism that shows marines raising the flag after the deadly battle. An icon? Undeniable.

Framed with it (a curatorial choice that appears overdone now, but doubtless originally had a memorial aspect) is Thomas E. Franklin's 2001 "Three Firefighters" raising the flag at the World Trade Center ruins, an image that was immediately embraced nationally. Has it achieved iconographic status?

The flag appears in 11 of the show's 108 images, not surprisingly considering its ubiquitousness after 9/11, a testimony to its uncontested iconic position. In a twelfth, Edward Farber's 1941 "The Flag is Passing By. Citizens Day Rally, Milwaukee," it is the unseen subject that men hold hats over their hearts for or salute, the latter emulated by three boys sprawled on the grass beneath a reviewing stand.

Another icon, Abraham Lincoln, appears within the "Legacy" section of the exhibition, which also includes photographs of the frontier West by notables Timothy H. O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, both of whom were documentary photographers on U. S. Geological Survey teams.

O'Sullivan and Jackson are also represented in "The Road," a part of Americana that is itself iconographic, especially when reduced to a long, lonely, black and white two-lane stretch.

Other categories are Glimpses, Workers, Family and -- Icons, here referring to the many famed photographers, and some of the works that built their reputations, in the Eastman House collection.

Among these included are Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Aaron Siskind, Lewis Hine, Margaret Bourke-White and Paul Strand. In the case of Ansel Adams and Yosemite, it is the icon photographing the icon.

Not all of the memorable works are by renowned photographers. The 1912 "View of Luna Park," Coney Island, by George P. Hall and Son, is dream-like and wondrous. And Will Connell's circa 1937 "Hands and Baby" -- in which a pair of, by comparison, giant, tanned, laborer's hands interlock fingers to support a white-clothed infant -- is both moving and arresting in its bare-bones depiction of vulnerability and protectiveness.

More pedigreed is W. Eugene Smith's 1946 "The Walk to Paradise Garden" showing, from behind, the photographer's two very young children emerging from a shady woodland path into the daylight. The only slightly taller and slightly in-the-lead boy and his curly-haired sister lean in toward one another as they make their way forward, a picture of innocence and promise.

Westmoreland curator Barbara Jones says that Smith had been seriously injured as a war correspondent in Okinawa. "This is the first picture he took after he returned. It's very symbolic."

Pre-9/11, Smith's image may have been dismissed as being too precious. That's the very quality that elevates it now.

The museum invites visitors to bring or send a copy of a personal photo "that represents your values, hopes or dreams." They'll be taped, among the many others already posted, to the wall of an adjacent gallery. For submission guidelines, visit the museum Web site.

"Matters" continues through June 3 at 221 N. Main Street, Greensburg. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday and until 9 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $5 suggested donation, free for students and children under 12. For information, call 724-837-1500 or visit www.wmuseumaa.org.