MUSEUM EXTENDS PHOTO EXHIBIT TO INTERNET.

Byline: Carl Hartman Associated Press 

A new exhibit of early photography in America will spread far beyond the walls of the National Museum of American Art through a site on the World Wide Web.

Both ``American Photographs: The First Century'' and the Web site ``Helios'' were scheduled to open Friday. But museum officials said Thursday that technical reasons forced a delay of the debut of ``Helios'' at least until early December.

Americans know Samuel F.B. Morse best as inventor of the telegraph. But when Morse was in Paris in 1839 seeking a French patent for that, he visited the studio of Louis Daguerre and saw the first images on the Frenchman's silver-coated copper plates. Morse, also an accomplished artist, wrote to the New York Observer that the pictures were ``one of the beauties of the age.''

Within a few months, studios making daguerreotypes were springing up all over the United States.

Some of photography's popularity in the United States came because Americans of the early 1800s were looking for new things they could call their own, said Merry A. Foresta, curator of the museum's show. It was part of a search for identity in a nation only a half-century old.

``Photography was not only a new art, but a way to reflect all the new things that Americans were doing,'' Foresta said.

One thing Americans are doing now is developing the Internet. Steve Dietz, demonstrating the exhibit's material on the Helios Web site, called it the museum's ``cyberwing.''

Site users will be able to view not only the show's photographs and wall captions, but also hear up to three hours of commentary and discussion. They can contribute to the discussion and have a chance that some of their musings will be made part of it.

The museum's collection includes no photographs by Daguerre or Morse, who also made a few, but it does include:

-An 1863 Matthew Brady image of a Union soldier with an ailing comrade during the Civil War.

-An 1898 photo of three shy members of the once-warlike Kiowas from a reservation in Oklahoma, posed against a painted backdrop by Frank A. Rinehart or his assistant Adolf Muhr.

-Photographs by George Barker of Niagara Falls, including one made in 1888 that he livened up by painting a big rock in the foreground.

-A 1912 shot by Clarence H. White, who taught art and photography at Columbia University Teachers' College, of a group of his young students during a rest hour.

The pictures come from the collection of Charles Isaacs, a former photo editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, acquired by the museum through purchase and gift.

``American Photographs: The First Century'' at the National Museum of American Art until April 20, 1997; at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., Aug. 31-Nov. 2.

Helios Web site at http://www.nmaa.si.edu/Helios/AmericanPhotographs.

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Photo: Mathew Brady's ``The Sick Soldier,'' made in 1863, is part of the exhibit.

Associated Press