No one person gets credit for inventing photography. The honor tends to be spread among several individuals, mostly in France and Britain in the 1830s and ’40s, who were responsible for the innovations that set the medium in motion toward its many modern incarnations.


Even less does anyone get credit for realizing that the human body was a natural subject for this new invention, given that the body had been the most constant subject of art since the beginning of human time. Still, one can’t help but imagine the camera-body connection flashing like a kind of wildfire across scores of alert, mostly male minds — spurred by impulses variously artistic, scientific, erotic and mercenary — throughout the second half of the 19th century and beyond.


The progress of the naked body through photography is the subject of “Naked Before the Camera,” a resonant and illuminating if sometimes fraught exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Malcolm Daniel, curator in charge of the department of photography, with assistance from Mazie M. Harris, a departmental fellow, the show presents nearly 90 images drawn entirely from the Met’s holdings, which are once more confirmed to be extraordinary.


Made mostly in Europe and the United States between 1850 and the present, the selection is rife with both unfamiliar names and old standbys — Nadar, Eakins, Muybridge, Brassaï, Mapplethorpe — and also with strange, unexpected and sometimes unsettling gems. (An 1860 image of a hermaphrodite, for example, from no less than Nadar.)


The show is on view in the small Howard Gilman Gallery, where it is announced by some rather un-Metlike signage. At the entrance the word “naked” is spelled out in buzzy, hard-to-miss electric lights — an approach that conveys a kind of hip accessibility but that also, in rendering the word as if on a marquee, brings a second word quickly to mind: ladies. In not entirely appealing ways it signals the show’s sometimes relentless confirmation of the male gaze.


“Naked” is more sedate than the lights try to suggest, perhaps because it places considerable emphasis on the medium’s early years, when its erotic potential was, by today’s standards, only intermittently apparent. But photography and sex, sublimated or not, were pretty much conjoined from the start. One of the earliest images in the show is a daguerreotype from around 1850 that centers on the figure of a woman naked from the waist down with her back turned to the camera. However clumsily expressed, its prurient intent cannot be misconstrued.


Over all Mr. Daniel’s selections show how photographs of the body have intersected with the histories of painting, medicine, forensics, erotica, commerce, Surrealism and feminism, and how they hint at the advent of Conceptual, appropriation and performance art. He begins in the studios of 19th-century Paris, where photographers made images, mostly of women, to be used by painters, to stand as fine art on their own or to masquerade somewhere in between while serving erotic purposes.


The first section includes Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s 1853 image of a reclining woman with her right arm gracefully raised; the photograph may well have guided Courbet when he painted his corpulent odalisque, “Woman With a Parrot.” According to the label — labeling is excellent throughout — Courbet was known to use photographs when painting, and de Villeneuve was known to sell images to painters. There is no record of contact between them, but the resemblance is striking. The label reproduces the painting, which also hangs in the 19th-century European painting galleries.


Some images approximate the saccharine comeliness of academic painting, as in Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin’s image of a pair of slim young women whose poses coyly evoke Greek Classicism. Other photographers achieve a degree of reality that Zola would have admired, as in Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes’s view of a woman sitting, somewhat slumped, on a chair in what looks like an artist’s garret, as if taking an overdue break from posing for a painter. Of course titles could add cloaks of artistic merit. “Ariadne,” an 1857 photograph by the Swedish-born Victorian photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, shows another woman from behind, more completely exposed, if more gracefully posed, than the one in that 1850 daguerreotype.