In March of 1985, the photographer Robert Frank arrived with a paper sack at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to use Polaroid’s 20-by-24-inch camera. It was a hulking beast of an apparatus, worlds away from the diminutive 35-millimeter Leica that had freed him to roam the country while shooting “The Americans,” the 1959 book of photos that crowned him a king of counterculture and the most imitated photographer alive today.

He emptied the bag of salvaged miscellany he’d brought to shoot, jotted a few cryptic words on bits of paper, and then pinned them together with old photos and other ephemera onto timeworn corkboards. In the resulting six-paneled work — “Boston, March 20, 1985” we see the corkboards arranged in grids like signs at an old grocer’s. Few clues reveal Frank’s intentions, but we know that his fellow trailblazing photographers, Robert Heinecken, Dave Heath and John Wood, were somehow involved: The images show scrawled dedications to them.

The four renowned artists were brought together by two photographic historians, Susan E. Cohen and William S. Johnson, who pulled off a curatorial feat that would be unimaginable today. They persuaded Mr. Frank, Mr. Heinecken, Mr. Heath and Mr. Wood to collaborate with them on a project whose contours were hazy at best. And then they persuaded the Polaroid Corporation to finance it.