That interest also inspired the work found in “So Easy to See.” Curated by MIT’s Gary Van Zante, the show marks a homecoming of sorts. Abbott had a fruitful affiliation with the university when she made her science images.

The photographs in “So Easy to See” have a strong science component, but camera technology is what matters most. That reference to “Super Sight” in the show’s subtitle isn’t metaphorical. It’s what Abbott called the method she developed in the early 1940s for making large, highly detailed photographs of small objects without having to use an enlarger.

Super Sight, which she also called the “Abbott Process” (giving credit where credit was due, after all) derived from centuries-old technique of the camera obscura. The great drawback of camera obscura images is their impermanence. Abbott rectified that. Her innovation was to project the image on a 16-inch-by-20-inch photographic negative.

None of the nearly three dozen Abbott photographs are familiar, which in its low-key way makes “So Easy to See” a revelation. In addition, the show includes Abbott ephemera about Super Sight: correspondence, pencil sketches, magazine articles, a list she drew up of suitable subjects to use it on, even a kind of mock patent application. There’s also a copy of a 1948 high school biology textbook using some of Abbott’s photographs as illustrations.

The earliest examples of photographs with Abbott employing the method were portraits. This was in March 1942. She soon turned to subjects that either lent themselves to Super Sight’s ability to enlarge detail, had some relationship to science, or both.

Small things seen large include coffee beans, resembling Neolithic sculptures; a halved walnut, its surface now presenting an almost-topographical heft; and the interior of a pomegranate, looking quite monstrous. Reality can come to look abstract when our expectations about scale and detail are upended so thoroughly.

Among the scientific or technical subjects Abbott photographed are a magnetic field (or, to be precise, the arraying of iron filings produced by one); quartz crystals; a sample of penicillin; a gauge and a light bulb, each looking impossibly elegant and very Bauhaus. They’re examples not so much of form following function as function becoming a form unto itself.

A photograph of a set of watch works combines to spectacular effect the categories of smallness enlarged and technology displayed. Two photographs of eyes (speaking of sight) are even more striking. One belongs to Abbott’s friend and collaborator, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, the other to a fish. In a winningly literal bit of hanging, a photograph of a fish tail hangs beside and to the right of that fish eye.

Abbott described her Super Sight pictures as “experimental work for a series of everyday objects.” That combination of experiment and everydayness can be disorienting, in a good way. Add in the rethinking of scale, and disorientation becomes a version of the surreal.

Underscoring this is one of the earliest photographs, of a kachina doll. The doll does not itself look surreal, but it belonged to the Surrealist painter Max Ernst and his then-wife, Peggy Guggenheim. Surrealism wasn’t necessarily an effect that Abbott, with her scientific bent and love of precision, strove for. She sought a greater realism, not a reworking of it.

Still, this affinity for the surreal might have pleased her, if only for biographical reasons. Abbott had moved in Surrealist circles in Paris, most notably through her work as an assistant to her fellow expatriate Man Ray. So while Super Sight unmistakably looks ahead to Abbott’s later scientific work, it also nods to that first phase in her career. In that regard, it’s a partial encapsulation — a different way of presenting something small in such a way that it looks much larger.

SO EASY TO SEE: Berenice Abbott’s Super Sight

At MIT Museum, 314 Main St., Cambridge, through March 31. 617-253-5927, mitmuseum.mit.edu

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.