Art

Stephen Shore

March 8-April 16

Edwynn Houk Gallery, 745 Fifth Ave, 212-750-7070. Before Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, there was Stephen Shore, whose serenely handsome, utterly matter-of-fact views of the American streetscape and landscape at the end of the ’70s set the standard for virtually all the work that followed. A selection of vintage prints from the landmark series he calls “Uncommon Places” (many reproduced in his 2004 Aperture book) is here.

Diane Arbus

March 8-May 30

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave, 212-535-7710. “Revelations,” the retrospective that opened at SFMOMA in 2003, finally arrives here, and will be hard to beat as the big-draw photography show of the year. Arbus’s impact and influence have only increased in the three decades since her suicide, and this show, with its wealth of previously unexhibited vintage prints and rooms of fascinating memorabilia, provides the fullest view yet of her remarkable accomplishment.

Aneta Grzeszykowska & Jan Smaga

March 10-April 23

Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Ave, 212-989-7600. This Polish collaborative pair, based in Warsaw, debuts here with a show of 10 massive composite images, each a tour de force combining aerial views of connecting rooms in a single apartment. Using hundreds of digitally interwoven images, Grzeszykowska and Smaga craft astonishingly detailed floor plans that could have only been seen had the dwelling’s roof been ripped off.

Larry Burrows

March 10-April 30

Laurence Miller Gallery, 20 W 57th, 212-397-3930. The photojournalist best known for his high-impact Vietnam combat photos in Life magazine (he died on assignment in 1971, covering the invasion of Laos) is represented by a choice selection of color and black-and-white reportage titled “War and Peace.”

Martina Mullaney

March 11-April 30

Yossi Milo Gallery, 525 W 25th, 212-414-0370. Milo inaugurates its new ground-floor space with the New York solo debut of an Irish photographer who shows big color photos of empty beds. Made in hostels and temporary shelters in England and Wales, Mullaney’s elegant, eloquent still lifes are understated records of absence and displacement, including fugitive traces of each bed’s former occupants beneath painterly expanses of blank wall.

Larry Clark

March 11-June 5

International Center of Photography, 1133 Sixth Ave, 212-857-0000. For this much postponed retrospective, the charismatic photographer-filmmaker-troublemaker brings together work from the books that made and then sealed his reputation, Tulsa and Teenage Lust, as well as the collage sequences, video installations, and feature- length films that followed (Kids, Bully, and if we’re lucky, the still-undistributed Ken Park will be screened). Nearly as influential as Arbus on a generation of young photographers, Clark should give her retro at the Met some serious competition.

‘Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938’

March 11-June 6

Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Ave, 212-628-6200. With more than 100 vintage prints from public and private collections, this survey of portraits from a period characterized by stylization and experi- mentation should offer some vivid contrasts. On one end of the spectrum are Helmar Lerski’s cinematically lit expressionist close-ups; on the other, August Sander’s uninflected but hardly unsympathetic studies of German archetypes.

Angela Strassheim

March 24-April 30

Marvelli Gallery, 526 W 26th, 212-627-3363. The solo debut of a recent Yale grad, two of whose photographs made a strong and unsettling first impression in this gallery’s 2004 summer show “Black Milk: Theories on Suicide.” Strassheim’s take on suburbia is cool but explosive, especially when her subjects are seemingly good little children.

Thomas Struth

April 7-May 7

Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 W 57th, 212-977-7160. The German photographer with perhaps the most wide-ranging approach to the New New Objectivity continues his investigation of museums and museumgoers with a new group of large-scale color photos made in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia. Here, however, the audience takes center stage, not as carefully staged tableaux but as individuals—faces in the crowd.

Simon Norfolk

April 21-May 28

Bonni Benrubi Gallery, 41 E 57th, 212-888-6007. Like so many contemporary photojournalists, Norfolk produces exceedingly artful editorial work, even when he’s reporting from the front lines and deep behind the scenes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Lebanon. For his first New York solo show, the British photographer shows super-sized color landscapes whose social and political significance may not be as readily apparent as their knockout visual impact.

Gregory Crewdson

April 23-May 27

Luhring Augustine, 531 W 24th, 212-206-9100. Crewdson’s cinematic exploration of the uncanny, the paranormal, and the freakishly ordinary in suburban America has inspired legions of acolytes and wannabes. The master returns with “Beneath the Roses,” a new series of elaborately staged and psychologically charged images.

Tina Barney

April 28-May 28

Janet Borden Inc., 560 Bway, 212-431-0166. Barney’s signature, aside from a painterly sensitivity to color, is her subtle balance of naturalism and artifice. Her deceptively casual family portraits—all made in her subjects’ homes, schools, or private clubs—are privileged glimpses of a privileged class, an insider’s view as valuable and ingratiating in its own way as Nan Goldin’s. Here, Barney continues her series on “The Europeans” with pictures made in Germany and Spain.

Orit Raff

April 28-June 4

Julie Saul Gallery, 535 W 22nd, 212-627-2410. This New York-based, Israeli-born photographer turns chilly conceptualism to her own quirky ends with studies of inanimate objects and enigmatic interiors. For a series she calls “Insatiable,” Raff combines color photos and video work made in bakeries here and in Israel, prompting us to consider bread not just as sustenance but as a metaphor for creation itself. Also here: a group of Bill Jacobson’s big, impressionistic streetscapes, mounted to celebrate the publication of Hatje Cantz’s new book of his color work.

Uta Barth

May 5-June 12

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 W 21st, 212-414-4144. Barth, whose work has always toyed with the limits of perception while teasing our sense of the sublime, shows a new group of multipanel sequences combining photos taken in her own home. Her subject—sometimes barely glimpsed, often a charged absence—is a constantly refilled vase of flowers photographed again and again over a period of months.

Sam Easterson

May 12-July 1

Daniel Cooney Fine Art, 511 W 25th, 212-255-8158. Previously, Easterson has attached small homemade video cameras to the heads of a pig, a cow, an armadillo, and a frog, and shown the unnervingly intimate creature’s-eye views as both color prints and video feed. For this show, he miniaturized his equipment even further so that it fit on insects; the resulting video stills were made from the p.o.v. of a bee, a butterfly, a housefly, a tarantula, and other unwitting collaborators.