ROCHESTER, N.Y. ? Americans living far from big cities will get a close-up view of 300 classic photographs that reflect the nation’s soul: Ansel Adams landscapes, battle scenes from Gettysburg to Omaha Beach, engaging portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Judy Garland, Babe Ruth.

Many are widely familiar: Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother during the Depression, Edward Weston’s seductive pepper, the first lunar orbiter’s image of Earth. Others, if less iconic, evince the power of nature, the misery of war, the tug of family, the glow of Hollywood.

The treasured pictures are usually secreted along with 400,000 others in climate-controlled vaults at George Eastman House, the world’s oldest photography museum. Next spring, they will be gathered up for a two-year tour of the nation’s hinterland.

“Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography” will nestle for months at a time in a half-dozen small towns and midsize cities. The exhibition is part of a visual-arts project supported by the National Endowment for the Arts to send the best of American culture from 11 museums and galleries to places with limited exposure to world-class collections.

The Eastman House is throwing darts at each vast corner of the country — Florida is one probable destination — as well as some place in the heartland. But it will be a few months before the communities are chosen. Minimum requirements: air conditioning and security.

“It couldn’t just go into a school lobby,” said Alison Nordstrom, the museum’s curator of photographs. “It would have to be in a place where there are people whose job is to keep an eye on things.”

The impulse, nonetheless, is to make an accessible art form accessible to the people — outside the metropolitan cultural centers.

“We are a collections-rich institution and we understand ourselves as the national museum of photography,” Nordstrom said. “It’s important that we make some new friends.”

Unlike a traveling theater or art show, photographs seem much more likely to capture the popular imagination.

“There’s a reverence for art museums but there’s also a certain level of discomfort: ‘What if I don’t know enough?'” Nordstrom said. “But everybody feels they know enough to appreciate photographs.”

To see the photographs all together, “to see the real thing” in place of reproductions in a book, she said, could be life-changing for some.

Although the technology has changed entirely since photography’s birth in 1826, “the quality of some of the early works is just truly outstanding, even by today’s standards,” said Popular Photography magazine’s editor in chief, John Owens, who toured Eastman House last year.