The first picture in “Right of Passage: Youth Culture From the Mid-Century” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery is “Brooklyn Gang” (1959) by Bruce Davidson. It shows a young man naked from the waist up with a tattoo on his arm making out with a young woman we can hardly see; they’re in the backseat of a station wagon being driven down what looks like one of Nassau County’s landscaped highways.The second picture, Larry Clark’s “Tulsa” (1970), is of a young man naked from the waist up sitting cross-legged on the rumpled sheets of a bed and holding up a shiny revolver in his right hand.

The third picture is “Adam and Eve Pub in Hackney” (1976), by Chris Steele-Perkins; here, young English men and women in the mod clothing of the period thrust their pelvises at each other as they dance.The fourth picture is Dennis Stock’s “Rebel Without a Cause: James Dean” (1955), presumably shot during the filming, in which Dean, in a white shirt, confronts a faceless attacker in a black leather jacket; each has a switchblade knife in his hand. In the fourth picture, “Lower East Side, 7th Street, C and D” (1969), by James Karales, a young woman stands beside an unmade mattress on the floor of a pad in Alphabet City. Among the graffiti scrawled on the wall behind her is, “I await only for the sweet kiss of death to touch my lips so I will suffer no more.”

In the middle of the sixth picture, Susan Meiselas’s “Lulu and Debbie, Tinbridge, Vermont” (1974), is the backside of a naked woman who is opening a stage curtain to show herself to an audience. In the seventh, “Untitled (Interior of Tattoo Parlor)” (1960), by Charles Gatewood, two young men inspect the designs offered. In the eighth, “Claudine and Vali from ‘Love on the Left Bank’ ” (1951), by Ed Van Der Elsken, one naked woman fondles her breasts and another in a bra is seen in profile.

What kind of culture is this?

There are many fine photographs by wonderful photographers among the 67 pictures in “Right of Passage: Youth Culture From the Mid-Century,” and not all of them are as louche as the ones I have described. Yet there is some thing askew about this collection.

A photography critic is supposed to discuss images, not parse words, but “Right” is wrong. It is, of course, a pun on “rite of passage,” although such rites are ceremonies that mark important stages in one’s life,and ceremonies imply custom and tradition. The activities in the pictures I described are to varying degrees dystopian, as if youths have a right to passage no matter what they do. And some of these people are pretty old to be youths.

But let’s forget the too-cute title and the gas in the press release (“They are shown exploring their independence and expressing their individuality.”); there are pictures to be seen here.

Helen Levitt’s “New York” (1942) shows three young women all dressed up, apparently with nowhere to go. They sit on crates in their dark party dresses and their done party coiffures, waiting outside a store in whose windows placards advertise movies starring the screen goddesses Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullivan. The three are plain, and compound their lack of good looks with their sullen, down-at-the-mouth expressions, so we are moved alternately to laugh at them and to feel sorry for them.

Also here are four pictures by the talented Sid Grossman, all titled “Coney Island” (1947-48). An important figure in the Photo League, both for his left-wing politics and for his exploration of the medium, Grossman was a critical link in the development of the New York School of photographers. These pictures of young people at the beach show him grappling with problems of subject matter and composition. Coney Island, the Hamptons for the masses in the days before air conditioning, also figures in pictures by Morris Engel, Ernst Hass, and Arthur Leipzig.

Ruth Orkin’s “Jewish Refugees at Lydda Airport, Tel Aviv” (1951) touched me. The night before I had been at a forum on photojournalism where patently absurd misinformation was used to disparage Israel, and therefore this image of three pensive young women crowded at the round window of an airplane as they catch the first glimpses of their future home was particularly moving. The three – dark haired, Eastern – were part of the exodus of 150,000 Jews from Iraq in the early 1950s: If they had not gotten out, what would have become of them?

Not all youths were partying and getting laid at mid-century.

***

There are many places besides art museums and commercial galleries to see photographs in New York City. The Museum of Chinese in the Americas is devoted to history and ethnography, but the museum is currently showing “The Virtual Salon: Chinese Transnational Photographers in the Digital Age.”

The exhibition showcases work from the Chinese Artist Network, a California-based nonprofit founded in 2002 to create a global community of artists and curators of Chinese descent. It’s worth a trip to Chinatown and a hike up the stairs to see the four photographers represented. (Or you can stay home and go to www.chineseartistnetwork.com.)

Ma Liang lives in Shanghai and creates illustrations for what might be described as contemporary fairy tales. In “My Circus I” (2004), a smartly dressed woman stands in the small inner court of an aging building. She holds a toy whip and a hoop, and a stuffed tiger doll sits on an inflated yellow ball while another yellow ball floats upward.

Cheng (Felix) Tian was born and educated in China but immigrated to the United States in 1993. He used infrared film for his 2003 “Nostalgia” series because it gives a slightly surreal gloss to otherwise realistic images. Xie Wenyue takes elegiac blackand-white pictures of abandoned industrial sites: Once powerful symbols of the regime’s ambitions, they are now deserted as the economy becomes increasingly post-industrial. Wang Yishu has a wicked eye for juxtaposing unlikely elements thrown together by the rampant forces in contemporary China, including the hapless zebra that seems to have wandered into the garage of a crowded tenement in “Zoo” (2000). These images suggest a continuity with traditional Chinese art: Like so many Chinese at home and overseas, these four photographers are trying to reconstruct their battered culture.

wmeyers@nysun.com

“Right of Passage” until April 29 (41 E. 57th Street, suite 1406, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-334-0010). “The Virtual Salon” until August 27 (70 Mulberry Street, second floor, between Canal and Bayard Streets, 212-619-4785).