Celebrating a century of photography

So Worcester can well justify a celebration of its photographic centenary. Just as important, it has the means to throw a swell party. Although the museum didn't get around to beginning a collection until 1962, it now has some 4,000 photographs. The quality of its holdings is indicated by the 110 images that make up ''Keeping Shadows: Photography at the Worcester Art Museum."

David Acton, Worcester's curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, has sought a balance between the little-known and the famous, the unexpected and the familiar, the mundane and the momentous.

How momentous? Greatest hits don't come any greater than Dorothea Lange's ''Migrant Mother," Alfred Stieglitz's ''The Steerage," and Andr Kertesz's ''Chez Mondrian." These are images that transcend photography and a place in our common cultural consciousness.

Other photographs are only slightly less famous: Joel Sternfeld's ''McLean, Virginia, December 4, 1978" (has orange ever seemed orangey-er than in its deadpan juxtaposition of pumpkin stand and burning house?), Mathew Brady's ''General Robert E. Lee and Staff," Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky, Garry Winogrand's ''San Marcos, Texas" (which, in an ideal world, would simply be called ''Swimming Pig With Human").

Along with great images, there are great photographers. ''Great" is one of those words that gets endlessly abused in this culture -- call it the Frosted Flakes Syndrome and blame Tony the Tiger -- but so many of the photographers in this show really are great: They not only excelled at photography, they helped define it: Eugene Atget, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Richard Avedon -- and that's just the A's.

No one photographer dominates. (Even ones whose names come later in the alphabet, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Irving Penn, August Sander, Josef Sudek, Edward Weston.) To ensure variety, none appears more than once, unless ''Anonymous" or ''NASA" counts.