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Many an art show probably started with a surprising image that compelled a curator to explore new territory. But “ ‘Ghost in the Shell’--Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000,” which opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Oct. 24, may have the most bizarre beginning of all.

The pictures that grabbed the attention of Robert Sobieszek 33 years ago, finally leading him to organize the exhibition and write an exhaustively researched book, depict a toothless old man grimacing in terror and agony while being subjected to electroshock treatments. The images are the work of Duchenne de Boulogne, a French physiologist who did pioneering research in kinesiology and neurology from 1835-75 and photographed his experiments.

“I was researching the work of Oscar Rejlander, a Swedish-born Victorian photographer who lived and worked in England and is credited with being the first photographer to do a photomontage,” Sobieszek said in an interview at the museum, where he has been curator of photography since 1990. He was recently appointed deputy director for strategic artistic initiatives--a position that involves long-term planning for museum staff and facilities.

His research led him to Rejlander’s illustrations in Charles Darwin’s book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” “I opened the book, and there was Rejlander posing as disgust, disdain or whatever, just mimicking emotions with the camera. But along with Rejlander’s pictures were these strange pictures of an old man being shocked with electrodes,” Sobieszek said.

“I had no idea what kind of pictures these were, what kind of tradition they fit into; they looked like an early cut from a ‘Frankenstein’ film. I was determined to find out more about this work because it was fascinating. It had no place in art history, but yet it did in a funny way once I learned that Duchenne did a guide to chart the muscle contractions that form emotional expressions. He added an aesthetic section to his publication, ‘Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine,’ because he thought artists should know how to paint the expressions properly, anatomically properly.

“He went so far as to critique certain paintings and take casts of famous classical sculptures and point out what was wrong with them,” Sobieszek said. “Don’t forget, this was in the time of Realism and Naturalism in the 1850s. But Duchenne didn’t side with Courbet and those schools. He thought those artists just dealt with ugliness; he wanted beauty, but truthful beauty.”

Sobieszek’s first encounter with Duchenne occurred in 1966, when he was a graduate student at Stanford University and working as a summer intern at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. Born in Chicago, Sobieszek, 56, did his undergraduate work at the University of Illinois. He held various curatorial positions at Eastman House from 1967-78, then took a leave of absence to work on his PhD at Columbia University. He returned to Eastman House in 1981 as director of photographic collections, a position he held until his move to Los Angeles in 1990.

As his career evolved and he became a renowned curator and scholar, Sobieszek tracked artists’ depictions of facial expressions through history and discovered that attempts to find meaning in human faces--not only in terms of emotions but also moral character--go back at least to the age of Aristotle. “St. Jerome [a monk and church scholar who lived around AD 340-420] said the eyes are the window to the soul. And today at Ralphs, you can buy for $1.09 a little tiny paperback guide to reading faces,” Sobieszek said. A copy of that book is one of about 175 items in the exhibition.

Intrigued with connections between physiognomy and the fine arts, Sobieszek gave a few lectures on the subject in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and began to think about organizing an exhibition. “When I came here, I put the nucleus of it on the books, as a potential future exhibition.” As the years passed, the idea remained in the back of his mind while he attended to more pressing projects, including photographic exhibitions on artist Robert Smithson, writer William Burroughs and the collection of Sidney and Audrey Irmas.

Surveying “Ghost” in retrospect, Sobieszek admitted to a bit of procrastination but also cited valid reasons for the delay. “I stalled all those years because I could go from Duchenne’s expressive faces in the 19th century to the great portraits by Strand and Weston and Stieglitz in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But in the 1970s, before Cindy Sherman and Postmodernism, my big stumbling block was that interest in faces truly emoting was replaced by theatrics, like Marilyn Monroe aping for the camera,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to do with that, and I didn’t want to do just a portrait show. Then I realized that I was discounting the vast majority of portraits, the blank, unexpressive ones from ID passport pictures to Richard Avedon’s portraits and, to some degree, Irving Penn’s portraits. I knew I had to include them, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it,” he said.

The first break in his mental logjam occurred three years ago, when he was asked to write an essay on some aspect of a collection that had been donated to Harvard University. The gift included books of Duchenne’s work, so Sobieszek immediately chose that as his subject and began rethinking the long-contemplated exhibition.

“One day while I was mulling it over, I was talking to one of my colleagues here, [curator] Tim Benson in the Rifkind Center, and he reminded me to go back and look at Oskar Schlemmer’s drawings,” Sobieszek said. Taking Benson’s advice, he discovered “Man and the Emotions,” a drawing of a little performer on a stage being watched by a much larger figure. “One vector line comes from the throat of the performer to the ear of the observer, but out of the eye of the observer come all these radiating lines,” Sobieszek said, referring to a reproduction of the drawing in his book.

Suddenly, “like a lightning bolt,” he understood that while 19th century physiognomists tried to interpret faces as indicators of character, personality and psyche, modern artists, such as Schlemmer, projected their own ideas onto faces. At the same time, “all of us viewers project our subjectivity onto the faces we see,” he said. “If we look at a mug shot, we project our notion of criminality. If we look at an ethnographic picture, we project our notions of otherness or alienness. If we look at a beautiful picture of Kate Moss, we project our desire or lust.”

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Once he put those thoughts together--along with relatively recent developments in photography--all the elements of the proposed exhibition and book fell into place. Conceptually, he had a three-part project, composed of “expressive faces,” “blank faces” and “false faces.”

Duchenne was obviously the key figure in the first section, so Sobieszek decided to choose a lead artist for the other two parts. “I immediately thought of Warhol for blank faces,” he said. “My first thought for false faces was Bruce Nauman, but Cindy Sherman with her multiple personalities proved much more interesting because I could talk about many other things that also included Nauman.”

The tripartite structure seemed more and more logical as the project took shape, he said, ticking off ways to think about the categories. “Expressive, blank, false; Duchenne, Warhol, Sherman; traditional art, Modernist art, Postmodernist art; hysteria, paranoia, schizophrenia. Or with a different little click of the ratchet, hysteria, attenuation or the death of affect, and dissociation or multiple personality disorder. It seems to work.”

He named the exhibition “Ghost in the Shell” after a Japanese graphic novel by Masamune Shirow and an animated film based on the novel and directed by Mamoru Oshi. Both pose questions about distinctions between human beings and cyborgs. A similar line of questioning pervades his explorations of photographic depictions of faces, Sobieszek said.

With a conceptual framework and a title in mind, it might seem that Sobieszek merely had to fill in the blanks. But he is quick to point out that history, human behavior and art can’t be divided quite that neatly. “In actuality all of these things were happening at the same time between 1850 and 2000,” he said. “There’s even a Victorian antecedent to Cindy Sherman--Richard Cockle Lucas. He was a mediocre public art sculptor who did equestrian statues for parks and things like that, but in 1865 he did an album of self-portraits, cartes-de-visite images, which are studies of expressions.”

Front and rear views of a human skull appear respectively on the front and back covers of the book. Inside, Sobieszek incorporates everything from Greek antiquities to 17th century French artist Charles Le Brun’s schematized drawings of human expression, to mug shots of criminals and war orphans. Although the three main chapters correspond to Duchenne, Warhol and Sherman, Sobieszek’s investigation of each theme roams freely over a broad period of time.

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The exhibition will be quite different. “I realized that filling one or two huge rooms with blank faces was going to be deadly boring,” Sobieszek said. “The reality of history is that all these things are happening concurrently. That’s fine for a book, which is theoretical, but the show has to be something else. So we will arrange it chronologically, give or take a couple of years. That way, the very general public can see a history of photography from the daguerreotype and salt paper print to videos and computer work, while people who know about the history of photography can see a history of portraiture.”

Duchenne, Warhol and Sherman are touchstones, but their work will not dominate the show, which will include works by historical icons such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, Surrealist Salvador Dali and contemporary celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz. Among the most recent pieces are a video installation by Nauman and a mixed-media piece by Tony Oursler.

“One educator here at the museum asked what I wanted kids to get out of the show,” Sobieszek said. “I said if they realize that we project as much, if not more, into faces as there is in the faces, and if [viewers] understand the person [pictured] isn’t what we see but what we think we see, maybe that’s not a bad lesson.”

Upon his arrival at LACMA, he took charge of a fledgling department and a collection of 2,700 photographs. Today the museum has a comprehensive holding of more than 7,000 photographs.

Now that “Ghost in the Shell” has finally come to fruition, Sobieszek said he is glad it took more than 30 years to evolve, because it encompasses much more work than it could have earlier. He is also pleased that it fits into his curatorial mission at LACMA.

“When I came here, I said I’m not interested in photography, I’m only interested in artists that deal with photography,” he said, recalling a 1990 Times interview. “Part of my agenda here, which I couldn’t really do at Eastman House, has been to reconnect photography with all the arts. Photography isn’t out there, ghettoized all by itself. People who use cameras are looking at paintings, reading fiction and listening to music just like any other artists. The show will be a photographic exhibition, but the book really weaves the photographs into all the art theories of the time, and into science as well.”*

* “ ‘Ghost in the Shell’--Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Oct. 24-Jan. 16. Hours: Mon., Tue, Thur., noon-8 p.m.; Fri., noon-9 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission: adults, $7; students and seniors, $5; children over 5, $1. (323) 857-6000.