If you thought you knew the medium of photography, the show currently at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA), “The Morphing Medium: Photographic Books, Installations, Alternative Process and Ephemera” (through Dec. 3), will likely – and happily – explode that view.

As the title indicates, the show packs a lot in. Too much, in fact. The work of about 20 artists crams the walls, which means quieter contemplative works like Dawn Surratt’s ethereal “Ephemerality” installation and Sarah Szwajkos “Liminal III, IV and XI” don’t have the space they need to really fall into them in the way that is required to fully appreciate their lyricism and aura of the sublime. And a Plexiglas case packed with handmade books and other items makes these works feel a bit inaccessible (and also crowded).

But several variations on the photographic medium will surprise our prevailing notions of what photography is. Take, for instance, the assumption that a camera is necessary to make a photographic work. While it was at some point for the Deb Whitney’s “Rose Colored Goggles” series, the actual making of these pieces required no such thing. Whitney appropriates photographs of women from the World War II era and transfers them onto pieces cut from pink receiving blankets.

These women are soldiers, pilots, riveters and others whose efforts on behalf of the war kept America working and the various military fronts supplied with munitions. All wear goggles, the lenses of which Whitney embroiders with pink stitching. She also embroiders halos, force fields and other patterns around their visages.

Yes, someone initially had to take the pictures she incorporates. But the names and identities of both photographer and subject are mostly lost to history. What Whitney has created – essentially feminist works that glorify the resilience of these women as well as of so-called “women’s work” (embroidery, mothering) – is several steps removed from the photographic process. It’s a powerful and interesting installation that only tangentially relates to the medium.

DW Witman offers us circular works that look like we are peeking at sections of the cosmos through a telescope. But the deep space, stars, nebula and comet tracks here are nothing of the kind. For this series, she went out late at night to hunt for slugs, then placed them on silver gelatin photographic paper. What we read as planetary activity are actually the trails they made over intervals of time as they crossed, sidled and doubled back on the paper.

Photograms, which is essentially what these are, date back to the beginnings of photography and were especially popularized in the 1920s by Man Ray. But these are of a different order in the sense that they actually record action (albeit very slow action) rather than static objects placed on the paper and exposed to light.

“With Supercluster Arion and Other Phenomena,” Witman writes of the work, “I continue to explore my themes of obsession – ephemerality, biology, synergy and finding a way to make the intangible tangible.” These works are both science and art, which earlier photograms are not. And don’t worry slug lovers; no slugs were harmed in the making of the works.

Sarah Szwajkos’s practice involves climbing to a high vantage point and photographing open sky. She then mounts these large-scale prints onto Plexiglas. That is a fairly conventional use of the medium. Yet there is no indication of the source material here, which is intentional. We are simply confronted by what look like color studies. The Plexi allows light to seep into the area behind the prints themselves, making them feel liquid and glowing.

The combined effect of this technique and practice allows Szwajkos to conjure a different state of mind and space entirely, something that exists, in the words of her statement (actually a poem she wrote) “in between – everything and nothing.” Rather than simply capturing a specific moment in time with its particular conditions (photography’s earliest aim), it transports us to a non-existential mystical state.

Barbara Goodbody uses a process called mordançage for her two images. It was a process – based on a 19th-century technique but further developed in the 1960s – she learned from Jean-Pierre Sudre while spending time in Paris. It involves immersing a fully developed print in wet baths (acidic copper(II) chloride, hydrogen peroxide bleaching solution, acetic acid). This lifts black emulsions from the surface, altering the image. The time the print spends in these baths produces various degrees of alteration.

And that’s the point. Again, it begins with photography, but the end result differs substantially from what we are viewing. So, a sunflower, for example, looks so scorched and bleached by light that it enhances our sense of sun and heat in the final composition. It is a manipulation controlled by the artist to heighten one or another effect.

The tweaking of the medium employed by W. Eric Brown – at least in my favorite of his books, “Quality Enlargements 1/1” – is in the Rives RBK paper he uses. The images are inkjet prints of beach scenes: palm trees, ocean, a pool, an inlet, various architectural details, etc. They are moody shots in themselves. But when the ink makes contact with the paper, something wondrous happens. The 100-percent cotton material has a woven substrate that amplifies the ink absorption. This, along with the creamy color of the paper, yields images that look like old 1940s postcards, but at a large scale. The sense of memory they evoke is comfortingly, yet also poignantly, palpable.

Carol Eisenberg’s images are digital manipulations. The original material for the elements she overlays and mixes are photographs she takes and loads into a computer. Then she begins isolating elements from them and layering them in ways that result in particularly painterly images. They are only “photographic” in their original state, but then extrapolated as textures, colors and applications a painter might create using pigments and brushstrokes.

Clearly, there’s a lot more here – too much to go into. In order to appreciate what many of these artists are doing, it really helps to know the techniques they are using. Director Denise Froehlich requires little prompting to launch into illuminating explanations. This makes a visit to this postage stamp-sized gallery-museum a particularly interesting and educational experience.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com