Sometimes a photographer takes someone else’s picture. Maybe he admires another photographer’s style and consciously sets out to experiment with it. Or maybe he has so absorbed the other’s style he replicates it unintentionally. Or maybe the two are subject to the same influences and simultaneously develop similar styles. And sometimes a photographer determines to undermine a “master’s” authority by doing what the master did, but better.

“Walker Evans and His Early Circle: Berenice Abbott, Helen Leavitt, Peter Sekaer, Ben Shahn, Ralph Steiner” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery presents six brilliant contemporaneous photographers who were engaged with each other in many ways, an intricate fandango of influences. For instance, Abbott brought back from her stay in Europe a large selection of pictures by Eugene Atget, the indefatigable recorder of fin de siecle Paris, which she shared with Evans. Evans immediately understood their brilliance, Atget’s subtle drama of place. Does Evans’s “Farmer’s Kitchen, Hale County, Alabama” (1936), one of his most famous images and quintessentially American, have its origins in Atget’s pictures of Parisian courtyards with their receding planes and empty quiet, their sense of life going on around the corner?

Abbott certainly incorporated much of Atget’s understanding of streets and buildings in her monumental project “Changing New York,” but her “Travelling Tin Shop, Brooklyn, NY” (1936) may well have been inspired by his extensive series on Parisian street vendors. The hawker stands beside his horse drawn shop loaded with pots and pans, looking curiously over his shoulder at the photographer as the rag pickers had looked at Atget, wondering how they had become an object of attention.

But Abbott also seems to have learned from Evans. In “‘El,’ Second and Third Avenue Lines, Hanover Square and Pearl Street” (1936) and in “Ferry, Central Railroad of New Jersey” (1936), the placement of the overhead structures that lead into the pictures seems to have been absorbed from Evans’s studies of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of which from 1928 is included in the Greenberg exhibition.

It is impossible to look at Ben Shahn’s “Arkansas Sharecropper and His Wife” (1936), to see the two of them in their worn overalls and gingham standing stoically with their backs against a log cabin and not think of Evans’s similar pictures in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” But Evans’s pictures were also taken in 1936. Whose were taken first, and when were they seen by the other? Were they ever? Both men were in the rural South documenting the hardships of the Depression, so it was probably inevitable that they would shoot similar subjects, and given their preference for straight-ahead, unprettified photography, inevitable that the pictures would have much in common.

Yet Evans and Shahn – although they knew each other well and admired each other – were different men and different photographers. Shahn’s leftist sympathies for the downtrodden are evident in his double portrait. But Evans, in, say, “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs)” (1936), is concerned with the texture of the wood siding behind his subject, with the pattern of her dress, and with the formal composition, to an extent Shahn would not be. Evans aestheticizes the tokens of Burrough’s poverty and the clear hardship shown in her face in a way that liberates her from sociology and politics, and presents us with someone more essentially human.

One subject all these photographers loved to shoot was street graphics: signs, posters, and graffiti. This was how 20th-century urbanites communicated with one another, the wall paintings of Modern cave dwellers. Helen Leavitt’s untitled 1938 picture of a chalk drawing from New York treasures a crude head with a candle burning on top and a comic strip type balloon enclosing “5c” and a glass with soda foaming over the brim. It must be soda, not beer, because there is a drinking straw in the glass. Her interest in graffiti was an extension of her interest in children and the mayhem of their play. This was Leavitt’s variant of the interwar ideology of the street as a locus of politics and theater.

We read the signage painted on the corrugated metal side of Peter Sekaer’s “Machine Factory, Savannah, GA” (c. 1936) as runes portending something more than the pattern makers, ship carpenters, caulkers, divers, brass castings, and acetylene welding they talk about. And

we notice the large hand with a pointing forefinger painted on the door above “MOVED TO 610 E. BAY ST” because it looks like a mate of the hand pointing the way to the license-photo studio in the first picture of Walker Evans’s seminal “American Photographs.”

Ralph Steiner taught Evans much about the technical aspects of photography, how to use certain cameras and darkroom processes; his “One Talking Picture” (1929) and other similar works must have influenced Evans’s interest in weathered advertisements for popular entertainments. Evans certainly appreciated the Modernist austerity of Steiner’s “Ford Headlight and Wheel” (1929) and the wicker rocking chair in “American Rural Baroque” (1930) before there was an extensive audience for such works.

And so it goes. Attending this exhibition is like being at a party some time in the 1930s with half a dozen enormously talented artists – all friends, teachers, learners, competitors – excitedly showing one another prints and explaining the great new ways they’d found to realize this or that effect (or the way someone else had found, which they’re intrigued with). Some have been drinking, all are worried about making the rent, but there is great jazz on the record player and the music encourages them. The vintage prints in this exhibition are like listening to that jazz on original 78-rpm records, a little worn with time but indelibly authentic. The talk does not stop.

Does Walker Evans show the group a small 2-by-1.5-inch print, “Flat Iron Building, New York” (1929), and explain how he went to Madison Square to shoot the building, a Pictorialist icon, in a way that would make that old stick Alfred Stieglitz realize photography now was different?

Until December 4 (41 E. 57th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-334-0010). Prices: $4,500-$160,000.