How we see things — which compositions, which visual vocabulary, which level of abstraction we accept, and which can be used to communicate to us — is rooted in our collective cultural experience. Confronted with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Henry V, or for that matter Abraham Lincoln, would likely have asked which side was the top. Today, even someone well out of the æsthete loop would at least recognize it as a coherent image and a purposeful composition. Continued exposure to what was once avant-garde breeds familiarity; over time, the extraordinarily uncommon becomes commonplace. Shocking approaches to art and design, when explored, revisited, expanded, cheapened, enriched, bastardized, and imitated, become integrated into the way their audience looks at everything around it. So it’s easy for us to view Charles Sheeler’s 1915 photograph Side of White Barn and accept it out of hand. Even if we didn’t know the title, there’s no way we’d be confused. It’s unimaginable that anyone ever saw this photo and asked where the barn was.

Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) was, for most of his artistic career, a painter. He took up photography around 1912, initially shooting architecture and documenting works of art, for the money. Within three years, he had laid the ground floor for a century of American photography by melding modernist ¾sthetics from European painting with subjects rooted in our domestic vernacular. His contemporaries and 21st-century scholars alike have credited him for innovations so influential that we now take such visualization for granted. Yet his photos, with the exception of selections from his 1927 series taken of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant, have seldom been shown.

ÒThe Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist,Ó which is up at the Museum of Fine Arts through February 2, is calculated to give exposure to Sheeler’s neglected work and to affirm his stature as a pioneer photographer on the level of Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen. Organized under the direction of Karen Haas, curator of the Lane Collection, from which the show’s prints are taken, the exhibit was guest-curated by the Fogg Art Museum’s Theodore E. Stebbins and independent French photo curator Gilles Mora. (Excellent essays by Stebbins, Mora, and Haas appear in the exhibit’s 224-page catalogue, which is published by Bulfinch Press and goes for $75.) The exhibition features complete sets of Sheeler’s major photo series, some of which had never been displayed intact. When it leaves Boston, it will tour to the Metropolitan in New York, the StŠdelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, and the Detroit Institute of Art. This is no incidental project.

And Sheeler deserves no less. The issue posed by Side of White Barn — so accessible in 2002, so alien in 1915 — drives home a point that most seminal-masters photo shows bypass: the dramatic change, from Pictorialism to Modernism, that photography underwent in the first quarter of the 20th century was not an isolated transformation. It ran a parallel track (tailored to the medium, of course, and touted in comparison with and reaction to what photography had been before) to what the early Cubists and other innovators were doing in paint. By the time Sheeler took his patterned picture of the white barn (Òflattened to non-objectivityÓ as Stebbins describes it), he had seen Duchamp’s Nude and other early Modernist works at the revolutionary 1913 Armory Show in New York (where Sheeler himself exhibited six paintings), and he had been mightily impressed. He began to incorporate elements cribbed (and later refined) from Duchamp, Picasso, and Braque into his paintings.

At this point, Sheeler’s approaches to painting and photography become forever intertwined. The influence on his painting was inescapable even after he abandoned photography (commercial and artistic) in 1931 at the insistence of his New York art dealer, Edith Halpert, who feared that critical citing of the relationship between his photos and his paintings would reduce sales. It’s clear that Sheeler saw photography as a companion to and a sometimes tool for producing his paintings as much as an art form unto itself. It’s equally clear that once he embraced photography as more than a meal ticket, any such distinctions became irrelevant to him.

The show’s opening art-photography series comprises exteriors and architectural interiors from an 18th-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, that Sheeler and fellow Philadelphia artist Morton Schamberg rented as a retreat between 1910 and 1926. Again, the cultural-context issue is raised. Modern viewers readily accept the Doylestown interiors as graphic, design-driven visual excerpts that both record the house’s rustic architecture and evoke a sense of being there — of seeing it through a visitor’s eyes. It may not be until we confront Doylestown House, Stairs from Below and Closet, Stairs and Stairwell (all circa 1916-’17) that we’re struck by Sheeler’s more immediate, more sophisticated purpose. To our eyes, Stairs from Below is recognizably a staircase infrastructure, but it’s also an unmistakable Cubist abstraction. This puts a new perspective on the rest of the series — and on Sheeler’s subsequent photographs. These are abstractions of the house’s interior even though they are faithful photographic reproductions of the furnishings and architectural elements. Step back. De-objectify the images. Compare these images with Sheeler’s 1925 oil Staircase, Doylestown. You’ll understand that the ¾sthetics Sheeler introduced to modern photography have become so much a part of the way we see things that we no longer recognize his photos as abstractions.

The MFA press material quotes abstract portraitist Marius de Zayas saying that Sheeler Òproved that Cubism exists in nature.Ó This is debatable, since Sheeler’s subjects are almost exclusively of man-made things. His 1927 Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors is far from anything natural, but the dramatic Cubist foreground, surreal against a backdrop of clustered smokestacks, does prove that, from the right point of view, our environment can verge on self-abstraction.

Sheeler’s other major innovation was born of a technique that didn’t catch on but is nonetheless ingrained in how we document our surroundings. From 1918 to 1920 he made three avant-garde films; the surviving one, Manhatta, on which he collaborated with photographer Paul Strand, runs continuously with the MFA exhibit. From individual frames of this (silent) stream-of-vision portrait of New York City as well as from an earlier movie exploring the clothed and nude form of his wife, Katharine, Sheeler made photographic prints. The use of 35mm film, never mind 35mm film shot as a motion picture, as a tool for still photography was virtually unheard of in the US — and rare even in Germany, where miniature-film technology was evolving rapidly.

One suspects that Sheeler, working in a new-to-him medium that was itself less than a century old, was exploring using movie cameras this way as a possible routine shooting technique. No need to gamble on catching that decisive moment — photograph all the moments and extract the decisive ones later. The result of his innovation, however, wasn’t to introduce movie technology to still photography but rather to introduce cinematic visualization to the art form. Sheeler’s prints from Manhatta are dramatic frames packed with geometry and suggested motion — glimpses of the city frozen without centers of interest. The nudes excerpted from the film of his wife (a film that was made before Manhatta) are similarly abstract in both form and concept — headless and form-driven, the like of which wasn’t seen again until Weston.

Charles Sheeler’s gifts to photography were monumental; his influence has been deep. He used realistic images to explore the forms of his mostly inanimate subjects and interpret them as art. That a farm house, an auto factory, a crowded metropolis, a woman’s body, and Chartres Cathedral could be subjected to that scrutiny and all emerge recognizable, comprehensible, and transformed is proof of Sheeler’s genius and the appropriateness of the way he used his camera. That approach would soon be expanded upon and championed by higher-profile photographers, like Adams and Weston, and become formalized as part of our visual repertoire. To see it so advanced at such an early stage is startling. To recognize it in everything we see is a revelation.