Living in the digital age, we've become cynics of images. In the era of airbrushing and Hipstamatic iPhone apps, photography has lost its caché as the artistic medium of truth. But a new Museum of Fine Arts, Houston retrospective of photographs by Heinrich Kühn suggests that the compulsion to manipulate images (and the viewer) is a century-old tradition.

As the blockbuster Carlos Cruz-Diez and Impressionist exhibitions clamor upstairs, Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph provides a quiet escape into the Austrian scientist and photographer Heinrich Kühn's realm of profound experiments in photography. With his eventual mastery of gum bichromate printing processes, Kühn empowered himself with the ability to change tones, add or eliminate portions of negative details and determine a photograph's emotional impact.

"All of this knowledge of technology and art is applicable to contemporary artists," says Monika Faber, the chief curator of photography at Vienna's Albertina museum. "Kühn was able to influence each image nearly as far as you can do with Photoshop."

As Impressionism was waning, Kühn and his colleagues in the Pictorialist movement strived to capture the atmospheric effects of that style of painting. He traversed Europe to visit the centers of Impressionism, studying the artists' use of light, which he would later expand upon on film.

The MFAH exhibition includes over 100 photographs, many the bequest of collector Manfred Heiting, that not only illustrate photography as a veritable art form, but communicate the scientific skill involved in producing evocative images. Although it's located in a somewhat remote gallery in the bottom floor of the Beck building, the show represents a coup for Houston audiences, as its the exhibition's only stop in the United States, following displays at the Albertina and in Paris' Tuileries, coordinated by the Musée d'Orsay.

In his quest to establish photography as a respectable medium, Kühn manipulated his prints to resemble etchings and charcoal drawings, often portrayed on watercolor paper to provide a painterly texture. Escaping the mounting anxiety of an increasingly industrialized pre-World War I urban Europe, the photographer created a dream world in his darkroom. What you'll find at the MFAH retrospective are enchanting stills of Kühn's family, posing in moody forms in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps.

Farb highlights the photographer's adept manipulation of montage in a 1915 series of iterations of a single photograph, "Burgstall near Brixen," on view towards the end of the exhibition. Kühn's children are seen mounting a hill with their nanny (and Kühn's mistress-muse). It's a perfectly bucolic landscape, and intentionally distracts the viewer from the horrors of the warfront, less than 100 miles away along the Austrian-Italian border.

Yet, unsatisfied with the outcome, the photographer drew on clouds and mountaintops in the background in a second version, also on display. The reproduction is so tightly produced that the new features look completely real. Still not ready to leave the work alone, he removed the new imagery, replacing it with the silhouette of hanging tree branches, superimposed from a different photograph taken in his own garden.

The final product, as suggested by the exhibition's title, is the perfect photograph.

Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph is on view through May 30.