The photographs have had an effect the exhibitors did not expect, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
On show as an exhibition called "Out of the Darkness" in the middle of Belfast, and simultaneously in Washington, they date from 1969 into this century.
More than 2,000 people came to look in the first three days. On average more than 200 arrive each day.
Several have walked out angrily, a few saying the collection is "too sectarian". To judge from the atmosphere the dominant response is silent horror, and sadness.
The comments book is one version after another of "What was it all for?"
The collection began as nothing more ambitious than a showcase for 58 photographers. Curator Peter Richards effectively decided sequence, theme and title. As the black and white of early years gives way to a wall of colour there are cheerful and dramatic recent images: delighted children holding hands and torches at the opening of last year's Special Olympics; the distorted mouth of a boxer as his opponent lands a punch, the work of one of the few local women photographers, Ann McManus.
Some might find apt enough comment on modern Irishness in the sight of little girls leaping in the Irish Dancing World Championships, ornate bewigged heads and flying feet pictured by Ian Trevithick against the backdrop, through the Waterfront's glass wall, of Belfast's rebuilt docklands.
Throwbacks still intrude in the record of the past decade, missiles landing among police as republicans and loyalists object, respectively, to marches and re-routings, a screen full of flame at an Eleventh Night bonfire with a single dancing figure in silhouette. Most visitors seem to linger instead over the monochrome of earlier drama.
The level of interest may have something to do with timing as yet another attempt to restore powersharing brings assessment of progress made, and the miles to go. Cameras can lie. They also document what is too easily overlooked.
Those who insist that nothing has changed should be compelled by their best friends to go and walk around these photographs. There are still horrors, like last week's double murder in Belfast. Look at this small sample of past misery, glimpse the almost incessant destruction of the 1970s and it becomes impossible to deny that what exists now is a settled if imperfect peace.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could find the selection "sectarian". The most harrowing images are of death, of course, violent and sudden, the devastation in its wake. Different killers produced identical effects.
Dated within a week of each other in December 1971 are photographs of the blackened ruins of McGurk's bar, in which 15 died when a loyalist bomb exploded without warning, and a tiny bundle in a blanket, one of two babies killed by another no-warning bomb, this time left by the IRA on the Shankill: the dead babies a revenge for the bar.
The photo of a rescuer carrying the little dead bundle was taken by Alan Lewis, who 26 years later photographed from child-level a little boy crying bitterly as he looks up at the coffin of his father, one of two policemen shot by the IRA just before their second ceasefire.
Asked as the exhibition opened about the Shankill photo, Lewis said a second scene was so dreadful his hands refused to focus the camera. Another of his photographs heads the exhibition's publicity handout - six-year old twins peering out through the damaged letter-box of their home after a loyalist pipe bomb in December 2002.
Some bring children to the exhibition, and talk them through it. The least ghastly and most spectacular in a dozen shots of devastation after bombings showed the contents of a stationery shop flying into the street at the moment of explosion.
One of the photographers heard a boy say this destruction could not be Belfast. "I remember that bomb," his father told him.
The undated scene of the aftermath of a booby-trapped car shows a coffin beside the car, a soldier with a rifle, fire brigade and police in the background, and a man with a camera, clearly in shock. What did such sights do to photographers, close witnesses often only a step behind rescue workers? Many people survived by slogging through trauma, its effects on most only recently recognised.
Peter Hain's deputy in the Northern Ireland Office, Paul Goggins, arrived yesterday to commend the exhibition and confirm that it will run for an extra week because so many want to see it.
Official support can diminish otherwise powerful messages. There is too much in this collective memory-bank to be diminished.
"Out of the Darkness" by the Northern Ireland Press Photographers Association is on show in the Ormeau Baths Gallery until March 31st (Ormeau Avenue, Belfast, Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5.30pm, admission free) and in shorter form until next Tuesday in the National Press Club, Washington.