"New York Now 2000: Contemporary Work in Photography," at the Museum of the City of New York

New York Now In 1839, the invention of photography was made public by the French scientist François Arago, acting on behalf of the better-known Louis Daguerre, and by a Briton named William-Henry Fox Talbot, who acted very much on his own. Somewhere on the shores of Lake Como, Fox Talbot first toyed with the notion that he might make durable the images cast by a camera obscura, themselves fleeting shadows of hard and fast things. Years of work and experimentation with paper and powdered silver finally gave photography to the world. The answer to this question, unfortunately, is not to be found in the current photographic exhibition "New York Now 2000: Contemporary Work in Photography." The first in a series of annual exhibitions planned by the 75-year-old Museum of the City of New York, this well-intentioned but amateurish show embraces what it calls "cutting-edge approaches" to capturing in paper and emulsion what is one of the most photographed cities in the world. Leaving aside for a moment the warm, airy afflatus that fills the empty term "cutting-edge" to bloating, the exhibition mostly ignores the difference between straight photography, a practice still bound up with documentary and social concerns, and photography as contemporary art practice, a self-critical, even narcissistic approach to imagemaking that, like a professional snitch, constantly divulges the false bottom packed into the diplomatic pouch of photography's truth-telling.

This distinction is a crucial one. For an exhibition like "New York Now 2000," the division between traditionalists, on the one hand, and postmodern actualists, on the other, proves essential to establishing curatorial credibility. It is quite easy, it turns out, to trace the dividing line curator Bob Shamis ignores in the work of the 41 New York photographers who make up his exhibition; it couldn't be any clearer if it were drawn in chalk. Wittingly or not, a large number of people in "New York Now" opt for the seemingly direct documentary style associated with a late 20th-century genre of photojournalism: the New York Times Magazine style of photographic essay. Another significant group turns back to old photographic techniques, such as the daguerreotype and the panopticon (an early version of 3-D imaging), instead of employing more current media like film and digital technology. A third inexplicably mimics the painterly and geometric compositions of photographers Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston, artists who once struggled to establish competing esthetic precedents for photography at a time when few people considered the practice a form of art.

But a handful of artists in "New York Now" animate this otherwise predictable show with genuine surprises that either query the foundations of photographic practice or knowingly restate some of its more treasured effects with consummate skill and feeling. Take the work of Jeff Mermelstein, color photographs of street life that employ a great deal of the once ultra-detached, now romanticized authorial stance of photographers like Garry Winogrand. There are the putatively archival photographs of down-and-out 42nd St. theaters by Andrew Moore, saturated in rich color and looking far more like Roman ruins than porno houses on the verge of being razed. And there is, too, in this convincing traditionalist vein, the impeccable work of the Cuban-American Luis Mallo: four rows of 20 black-and-white photographs of the hands of subway passengers, fidgeting with everything from rosaries to transistor radios.

The work of Katharina Bosse, on the other hand, spins the kind of newer photographic story that is not often enough told in a show like "New York Now." Shooting pictures of rooms that can be rented out to live out erotic fantasies, her photographs of fetishized, highly detailed interiors (such as a steel and glass operating room and a gold-colored boudoir) remind us of a truism we find easier to accept from consumer advocates than from photographers: what you see may not necessarily be what you get.

Similarly exploring the boundaries between public and private, or at least between the outside and inside, another Cuban-American, Abelardo Morrel, updates Fox Talbot's seminal observation about the camera obscura by constructing and photographing quintessential New York landscapes spread across the walls of anonymous hotel rooms. One photograph pictures the upside-down sign-scape of Times Square, including giant signs for Avis and the play Rent, conforming a literal bedroom nightmare of advertising and consumerism. Another brilliantly illusory photograph features competing images of the Brooklyn Bridge: a small framed picture is engulfed by its much larger inverted likeness, declaring both views in the process to be Platonic shadows, never mirror images with a claim to material or social truth.

The Museum of the City of New York is to be congratulated for this, its first real foray into the world of contemporary photography. Nevertheless, "New York Now 2000" is in great part an exercise in nostalgia, a show chock-full of tried, currently not-so-true methods of conceiving of and making photographic art. "Nostalgia," as Simone Signoret once quite rightly said, "is not what it used to be." Photography, by definition a speedy, forward-looking practice, when mixed with the wistful wish to return to simpler methods or past depictions, can manage to look especially passé.

"New York Now 2000: Contemporary Work in Photography," through Oct. 15 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave. (103rd St.), 534-1672.