A MARITIME ALBUM: 100 Photographs and Their Stories.<i> By John Szarkowski and Richard Benson</i> .<i> Yale University: 245 pp., $39.95</i>

The photographs in “A Maritime Album” are beautifully printed and compare well with fine reproductions of art. They were selected by John Szarkowski, a historian of photography formerly with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The “stories,” or commentaries, mentioned in the subtitle are by Richard Benson, dean of the Yale Art School.

Benson’s use of the word “stories” has a wide connotation. It includes historical information, brief narratives relevant to the photographs, remarks on their pictorial values and his personal reflections on what the photographs reveal about certain large matters of nature and culture. He asks a lot of the word, but “stories” seems to me perfectly apt. There is mystery, or drama, or a feeling of a story implicit in most, if not all, photographs. The word might also suggest that these photographs are somewhat magical occasions for wonder and thought.

The question of who took any particular photograph is itself something to wonder about. You say a painting is “a Rembrandt” or “a Whistler,” but you don’t ordinarily say a photograph is “a” or “an” anybody. In theory, any photograph might have been taken by anyone contemporary with it and, before anything else, we tend to believe photographs are crucially about something in the world, regardless of a photographer’s personal artistic vision.

In the introduction to “A Maritime Album,” Szarkowski writes he selected these photographs because they are “good to look at,” and he makes no claims beyond that for their aesthetic importance. According to Szarkowski, they were taken by photographers who thought of themselves as reporters, shopkeepers, adventurers, historians, artists, et cetera. He is appreciative of superior pictures produced by “high talent,” but he writes, “should we be less grateful for knowledge given to us by grace or luck?” The photographs in “A Maritime Album” are then a kind of knowledge, and they are indeed “good to look at.” They are also sometimes startlingly beautiful or fascinating for reasons not easy to specify, rather as if they had captured metaphysical qualities imperceptible to the unaccommodated eye swimming in time.

Szarkowski also writes that the photographs tell something of the history of “man and the sea” during the “period that begins with photography and the steamship, and extends to now.” He doesn’t want to claim too much for his selections, but in the photographs called “Fishing Craft on the Nile,” “Algonquin Canoe” and “Outrigger Canoe” we see types of boats that are marvels of technology and much older than steamships or cameras. Even if you could date the earliest canoes or fishing craft, these photographs register a quality of timelessness that is different from what we mean by history. Inherent in the boats’ lovely shapes is an organic understanding--cumulative, tested, refined by the experience of men in their relation to the sea--which can be seen or felt in the photographs.

About a photograph of a father and his two sons who are building a boat, Benson writes, “Something more ancient than boat building is going on here. . . . This is the process of learning by doing, the handing down of craft and understanding from parent to child.” Thus, a boat is a “repository of wisdom” and its construction is an occasion on which the parent surrenders his understanding and skill to his child who, eventually, becomes the parent and does the same for his child. In the photograph, the father and his sons, as Benson observes, wear the same workman’s clothing. The sons are not only learning how to build a boat but, in their clothing, they figuratively anticipate becoming the father. Benson finds in this the “subject,” or what the photograph is about, the “something more ancient.”

Reflecting on the father and sons building a boat, Benson regrets that much education today has been given over to books and “passed on by teachers instead of by practitioners.” He believes this amounts to a “terrible loss” for it emphasizes too much verbal thinking and “relishes knowledge separated from its generative physical roots.” The word “relishes” is striking. Is there an element of sterile perversity in thought and pleasure in the age of “the information highway” and computer games?

In another father-and-son photograph, Benson observes that the little boy sitting in the lap of his seaman father was “probably raised so far by his mother” and “sits here at the brink of conversion into his father.” Benson notices how the boy in the photograph, still his mother’s boy, is “doing his best to pull away from the strange man into whom he will gradually turn.” The boy does seem to pull away, but even if you read the photograph differently, it will remain true that it seems to contain a story and provokes questions of what it means, or what’s going on. Somewhere in the relation of subject and its implication lies the story Benson tells. It’s almost always factual, but it can also be speculative, a story intimated by the photograph.

Discussing the photograph of a ship named after a great storyteller, Joseph Conrad, Benson notices its most remarkable feature: “The light is that moving afternoon sort, when the sun breaks out to illuminate the foreground against the dark and cloudy sky; movie folks call it the magic hour.” The light seems to smash the hull and seize the sails of the Joseph Conrad. It is somewhat reminiscent of light in Goya’s nightmarish etchings. The subject of the photograph is a training ship built in Denmark for men “who had chosen a life at sea.” Benson tells us, “She was rammed by a steamer and sank with the loss of twenty-six young men.” The story of this ship, then, as told by Benson, is appropriate to the eerily lurid luminosity of its hull and sails. He writes the ship, having been recovered, is “afloat today under her new name at Mystic Seaport.” Indeed. A strange story is in this photograph as surely as the weird light. Benson himself wonders “if there is a certain unreality about this picture.”

In regard to a portrait of Donald McKay, in the scratched image of a copper plate more than 100 years old, Benson recognizes the man who built superb clipper ships and writes he didn’t achieve riches “because he was too interesting a character.” It’s been observed that money makes people boring to themselves and others, but there is nothing like that in McKay’s demeanor and the look of his hands.

The first photograph in the book is of hulks, the “worn-out and abandoned remains” of ships. Benson writes it is difficult to get rid of a sailing vessel, small or large. The skeletal hulls have an exquisite pathos. They are boats dumped in “the lower reaches of the river where a high tide has allowed them to be brought in and pervasive mud has held them firmly in place.” “A Maritime Album” contains a number of beautiful photographs of ships smashed up or mangled by some violence and made spectacularly still with the poignancy of finality.

Benson talks about another finality in the photograph of a massive fighting ship named the Adler, which has been stripped of its rigging and armaments by a storm and tossed far out of the water onto a coral reef. Benson tells the story of the Adler by talking about the nature of a storm, repeating Bernoulli’s theorem about the “behavior of fluids in regard to velocity and pressure.” Wind, or the rapid movement of air above the surface of the sea, causes air pressure to fall and the sea to rise. Benson writes, “The Adler was lifted . . . and then brutally dropped on the coral reef, to let us know, once again, who is the strongest player in this game.”

Benson frequently tells how things work, or precisely what they do or ceased to do, as in his comments on a crashed blimp or the results of a collision at sea between a destroyer and an ocean liner. Benson talks about diving suits, dories, propellers, ropes and cables, boilers and steam engines, and, in the photograph of workers in a fish plant, he comments on the meaning of the word “scrod,” a general term for different kinds of fish, and not, as many believe, “a particular creature caught off the shores of Cape Cod.” He goes on to say, “It is an irony of our educated times that the name given to any product should be so deceptive. If we buy lumber . . . we will find hemfir listed as a type of wood; this is simply the scrod of the building trades . . . a harvest of multiple types (fir and hemlock trees).”

You stare at the photograph of the Adler, a once mighty fighting ship killed by a storm, and then read Benson’s commentary where he writes nothing about composition or lighting or any other aesthetic value. He tells you about the dynamics of a storm and, afterward, you can’t overlook this astounding phenomenon--the piece of knowledge, as it were--saved in this fantastic photograph of a fighting ship flung upon a beach.