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A portfolio of 12 photographs at Hasted Hunt provides a greatest-hits view of Model’s approach to ferreting out vitality, dignity or beauty in offbeat subjects: a large woman crouching like a sumo wrestler on the beach at Coney Island; a contemplative “Little Man” on the Lower East Side; an elderly woman, in full make-up and plumage, on a San Francisco street.

The Aperture exhibition, which coincides with the reissue of a 1979 monograph, shows how Model’s edicts were absorbed in the United States. Her best-known pupil, Diane Arbus, perfected Model’s approach, both in street photographs and in images from voluntary home invasions, like Arbus’s “Backwards Man in Hotel Room, N.Y.C.”

You see Model’s influence in work by Bruce Cratsley, Raymond Jacobs and Leon Levinstein, who all trawled the streets of New York, capturing fragments of expression or intimacy; in Larry Fink’s social collisions in claustrophobic interiors; or when Elaine Ellman and Peter Hujar photographed the demimonde of downtown Manhattan with a probing, if sympathetic, lens.

This show also makes clear how mid-20th-century photography was a medium in which women could advance. In addition to Arbus and Ms. Ellman, Lynn Davis and Ruth Kaplan are here, as well as selections from Rosalind Solomon’s unsettling “Dolls and People” and “Hospitals.” All of these evince Model’s approach to photographing humanity, even when, as in Eva Rubinstein’s “Van Gogh’s Cell in Arles,” there are no people in the frame. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

STALKING WITH STORIES

The Pioneers

of the Immemorable

Apexart

291 Church Street, TriBeCa

Through Nov. 3

The lesson of the telephone game, that stories change through repeated telling, is reinforced here by European philosophy and art in which narrative is run through the cogs of history, memory and nostalgia.

Personalized narratives are the most striking. Artur Zmijewski’s video of a young German woman named Lisa, who moved to Israel, driven by a conviction that in a former life she was a 12-year-old Jewish boy killed by the Nazis, is a disturbing case study of internalized national guilt.

Katerina Seda’s artist’s book and video details how she coaxed her withdrawn Eastern European grandmother back into active life by persuading her to draw tools from the shop where she worked for 33 years.

Most of the pieces take a wider scope, including Ahmet Ogut’s wall drawing of a car project, meant to modernize Turkey, that went awry, or Sanja Ivekovic’s signs for stores in socialist Yugoslavia that called themselves Freedom, Knowledge or Unity. Felix Gmelin’s split-screen film, in which young people carrying a red flag run through the streets of Berlin (in 1968) and Stockholm (in 2002), juxtaposes the level of political engagement in the two eras.

Inspired by events in Europe during the last 70 years, the stories here lack happy endings (except, perhaps, that of the grandmother, who “recovers” enough to reside contentedly in the past). Rather, they follow the pattern of fictional narratives, which gain interest when filled with conflict, tension, tragedy and loss. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

ELIF URAS

The Occidentalist

Smith-Stewart

53 Stanton Street, Lower East Side

Through Nov. 4

Born in Ankara, Turkey, and educated in the northeastern United States, the painter Elif Uras has seized on the buzzword Occidentalism — a retort to Edward Said’s Orientalism. Her new oils and ceramics combine scenes of Western upper-class leisure with the nature-inspired motifs of Ottoman art, although they do not appear to privilege one over the other.

Four vases, produced in Turkey with the help of artists at the Iznik Foundation, show skiers and polo players practicing in abstracted landscapes of fish scales and tree branches. Cartoonish figuration, however intentional, gives these objects the unfortunate look of a paint-your-own-pottery project.

The paintings create a more mysterious hybrid of Eastern and Western sensuality. The best exaggerate the keyhole gaze (though not the seductive surface) of Moorish bath scenes by Ingres and Gérôme. In “Turk ish Bath” women wield hand mirrors like tennis rackets, deflecting beams of light across a blue-tiled grotto. The large-bosomed central figure in “Free” pinches her own swollen nipple. These scenes play out in the sort of richly patterned, indeterminate spaces that made Ms. Uras’s previous work so appealing.

She also experiments with color: Each of her five paintings has a dominant hue. In “White on White” she creates an iridescent interior of eggshell and vanilla tones. In “Stendhal Syndrome” she lets loose with an erotically charged red. “Keep Them Out,” an ochre-hued aerial lansdscape partly obscured by a chain-link fence, shows that Ms. Uras can be both decorative and topical. Otherwise, her “clash of civilizations” is more an arranged marriage. KAREN ROSENBERG

THOMAS EGGERER

Run River

Friedrich Petzel

537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea

Through Nov. 10

Art in galleries is appearing more frequently with a literary accompaniment: an artist-written news release or stream-of-conscious text. It arrives here in the form of a poem by the artist R. H. Quaytman, composed from recordings of Thomas Eggerer speaking about his paintings. The poem is distributed as a handout to gallery visitors.

Here’s a taste:

I am always thinking of painting’s position

within the perverse authority of its commodity status and

how it can have capacity

nevertheless?

Ambivalent

liminal

visual pleasure —

I guess.

Granting acerbic tensions free reign.

Mr. Eggerer’s paintings do, in fact, play around with ambivalence and liminality, repeating images of people on a beach or compositions of sailboats and tents in different formats or orientations. In some paintings the figures are sketched; in others they are more fully resolved. Some works pit photographs against painted passages — or other photographs — to examine how gestures, colors or forms interact.

But Mr. Eggerer’s paintings generate about as much heat on the wall as Ms. Quaytman’s poem does on the page. For bolder “acerbic tensions” you need to check out Mr. Eggerer’s earlier paintings, which planted people in vaguely menacing, somewhat abstract architectural spaces.

Mr. Eggerer is aware of the challenges facing contemporary painters. “As if one’s own liberated language could speak for itself/in a medium as overdetermined as painting,” the poem says. But here the pressures of forging that liberated language nearly drown out the visual pleasure. The poem, unfortunately, doesn’t pick up any of the slack. MARTHA SCHWENDENER