THE NEW YORKER

“CONTRADICTIONS IN BLACK AND WHITE”

Black-and-white photography has been declared dead for nearly as long as painting. But it continues to thrive, perhaps because, in the hands of good photographers, it’s far from conventional. Witness this shrewdly edited survey of historic and contemporary work, most of which blurs the line between representation and abstraction. Adam Fuss’s billowing smoke, Harry Callahan’s sun-dappled grasses, and Michael Flomen’s cosmic firefly traces and darkened field of snow stand in for the natural world in an otherwise man-made environment built up shot by shot by Ray K. Metzker, Nathan Harger, Margaret Bourke-White, and Vera Lutter. Through Feb. 28. (Hasted Hunt, 529 W. 20th St. 212-627-0006.)