Photo Finesse

Over the past 15 years the Giltnan Paper Company has put together the finest privately owned photography collection in America and perhaps in all the world, largely due to the efforts of curator Pierre Apraxine. He describes the collection as "an extensive novel of the 19th century I am writing with the works of others." This month the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens the first major exhibition of these singular treasures, "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. " It runs in Neu> York through July 4. The 250 images, many largely unknown, range from churches, lunatics, and slaves to Man Ray's portrait of Duchamp and Steichen's of himself. "To collect photography," Apraxine, 58, says, "is to collect the world. " If anyone needs proof, here it comes.

VICKI GOLDBERG