The idea originated a couple of years ago, when she observed how many younger photographers were rejecting the digital cameras and Photoshop they had grown up with in favor of analog, artisanal techniques, steeped in mystery and chance — the photographic equivalent, perhaps, of slow food or a fetish for turntables and vinyl.

“Maybe they are a little bit fed up with digital, this hyperinflation of images everywhere,” Ms. Knoppers said. “The original photographers came up with these amazing experiments,” she added. “It’s so inspiring.”

It’s a cliché to observe that photography is changing faster than ever before, but this is as nothing to 180 years ago, when the medium was in its infancy and experimentation was the order of the day. Even before Daguerre had perfected the daguerreotype in the late 1830s, the British amateur chemist William Henry Fox Talbot had successfully coated paper in light-sensitive solutions of sodium chloride and silver nitrate, the process that gave birth to the modern negative. By the early 1840s, Fox Talbot had drastically shortened exposure times, making it possible to photograph humans without blurred results. Within a decade, others were experimenting with “stereographs” (two pictures viewed through a lens that gave an impression of three dimensions), easy-to-develop glass negatives, cheap albumin prints — even color.

“We tend to forget the past,” Ms. Knoppers said. “The pace of change was astonishing.”

Some of the newest works in the show are by the L.A.-based photographer Matthew Brandt, who has become known for images of American lakes and rivers; his conceit is that the prints are developed using water from the sources he depicts.

Mr. Brandt’s recent work, “Waterfalls,” portrays a concrete dam near Flint, Mich., which became notorious in 2014 when contaminated water was introduced into the city’s drinking supply. Mr. Brandt photographed the dam in 2016, and also collected samples of river water, which he bottled and brought back to his studio. Once the images were printed, he ran the water over the prints using a pump, sometimes for weeks at a time; the liquid ate into the image surface, leaving toxic-looking spills of magenta, cyan, orange, and green. The pictures seem to make invisible poisons visible.