From BlackBerries to billboards, from cable TV to digital cameras, from the Internet to the iPhone, our lives are awash in graphic images.

By contrast, the 19th century "was a much more image-poor society. What images there were, were prints," said Christopher W. Lane, co-owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop.

An expert in American prints, Lane spent 1 1/2 years researching and curating an exhibition that opens Friday at the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze.

"A Panorama of Pittsburgh" showcases more than 130 views of the city from the 19th century. It's the Frick's way of celebrating Pittsburgh's 250th birthday.

The show's comprehensive catalog documents 423 known prints of Pittsburgh from two centuries ago, including publishers' images that were suitable for framing, plus illustrations for books, magazines, newspapers, invoices, letter sheets and broadsides. The show also includes maps, views on trade cards and currency or advertisements from books and directories, but the catalog does not.

A couple of watercolors and a drawing or two were used as sources for the prints, Lane said, adding that the largest number of prints were commercial, "where somebody paid a publisher because they wanted to illustrate a new text or advertise something coming up."

The first known printed image of a scene from Pittsburgh shows the Bakewell, Page & Bakewell glass factory on an invoice from about 1815.

Museum goers will see the first view of the whole city, which was published in 1826 and based on a drawing from 1796 by Joseph Warin. A cartographer, Warin was hired by Georges Collot, a French explorer. The two men sailed down the Ohio River; Collot's account of the voyage was published in 1826 and included Warin's picture.

At the time of the voyage, the French owned Louisiana and feared America would ally itself with the British, France's longtime enemy. So, Collot's journey "was kind of a spy mission," Lane said.

Collot's account was engraved in 1804, but by then, Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the United States. Only after a publisher discovered the manuscript two decades later, Lane said, did it appear in print along with Warin's work.

The exhibit includes the first drawing of Pittsburgh, done by Lewis Brantz. While it shows Pittsburgh in 1790, this particular print did not appear until 1853.

An entire section of the show focuses on images published in newspapers; the first illustrated American newspaper appeared in 1851, Lane said.

"These illustrated newspapers crank out amazing number of images of events and people and places -- a new building, an inauguration, a convention. If they hadn't illustrated them, we would have no visual record at all."