Snapshots of One Place & 100 Times

In reproduction, Barry Frydlender's pictures resemble simple snapshots. Each picture is sharply focused, and the compositions appear awkward, even at times unconsidered. In person, however, they show themselves to be impossible snapshots.

Trained as a photojournalist, Mr. Frydlender has reinvented himself and his medium for a more artistic practice. The exhibit of 10 recent works that goes on view at the Museum of Modern Art today, "Barry Frydlender: Place and Time," coincides with a retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum. At panoramic scales of up to 150 centimeters by 332 centimeters, the ubiquitous focus and strange angles are unachievable as single photographs. Rather, Mr. Frydlender uses dozens, sometimes hundreds of color images, all taken with a handheld digital camera and painstakingly stitched together in a computer, to make just one picture. The innovative process results in images of a uniquely time-lapsed quality.

Two of the best works in the show are dramatically horizontal. In "Blessing" (2005), clusters of Orthodox Jewish men assemble in a rural setting where pine trees frame them overhead and an ultramarine playground slide radiates in the background. Men and boys are grouped together across a panorama so well balanced it seems almost a staged tableau, though we are told it isn't. Likewise, in the beautiful, dark "Jaber Coffee Shop" (2003), Arab men play cards in a musky interior. It is a photograph of charged glances, of pondering, of looks and thoughts withheld. But most interestingly, a tinge of the artificial pervades the picture. Something about the picture isn't real, though the scenes and the people are.

To gather his raw material, Mr. Frydlender stands in one place, taking photographs of each piece of the larger puzzle, moving as little as possible; meanwhile, his subjects stroll unwittingly about. The final images account for this passage of time. A person appears two or three times in a single picture, shadows don't always match the subjects, and complex textures display pixilation at the edges. These glitches are the most important aspect of the works: The artist limits them through computer editing, even as the work relies on such clues of procedure for meaning and power. Through such repetitions, Mr. Frydlender imparts questions of time, documentation, and process into the layers of his mosaic. He has digitized the idea of the shutter.

Set in Israeli locales, Mr. Frydlender's photographs embrace political and religious drama. From the perspective of what appears to be a second-story window, "Raid" (2003) shows a dingy street corner populated by men carrying guns, filing out of trucks, and surrounding a dark doorway. Because the men are undercover police on a drug raid, Mr. Frydlender blurred their faces. But given the "place and time," to borrow from the title of the show, one naturally assumes graver circumstances. Documentation here becomes a series of editing decisions. It is at once controlled — as with the choice to repeat a figure wearing a red shirt in order to echo the red of a motorcycle helmet in the foreground — and uncontrolled, as with the necessity of obscuring faces for security purposes.

More often than not, Mr. Frydlender's pictures struggle to hold their own as photographs, not to say artworks. In "Shirat Hayam" (2005), the straight line of the green sea in the background betrays the wideangle curvature of the line of soldiers in the foreground and the rooftop angles of the buildings dotting the beach. Taken in the Gaza Strip in August 2005, no amount of emotional or political meaning, nor the understated repetition of two female settlers, makes up for the fact that as an image it is neither well framed nor striking in choice of subject. It has none of the tension of the complementary "Waiting" (2005), which shows a group of Arab men pacing back and forth on a road behind the drama of the soldiers and settlers. Without an anchor in the foreground, these works flatten before the eye.

In "Estates" (2005), a shimmering blue swimming pool at a highend real estate development is contrasted with a decrepit Jewish cemetery on the other side of a wall. But, perhaps because everything is so sharp, there is no real depth.

Because many contemporary artists and photographers use digital composites, that Mr. Frydlender does so with a documentary aim is alluring. What seems to interest MoMA is Mr. Frydlender's attempt to make documentary photography in a digital age, without betraying the conventions of the medium. His goal is not to enhance a single image or create a fiction, but to record many moments in one place. The distortions and duplications that creep into the pictures are signs of how he stands apart from others such as Jeff Wall, whose solo show of large light box photographs closed Monday at the museum. But Mr. Frydlender's innovation is perhaps more interesting in theory than practice.

Until September 3 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212- 708-9400).