Andrew Moore’s latest body of work (2002–06) pays homage to painting via photography. The latter medium was long thought of as painting’s evil twin, maligned as “the French art of the devil” soon after its invention in 1839. Mr. Moore seeks to tweak the realism of straight photography in the direction of various representational styles of painting. He traveled to Sweden, for example, in search of a landscape that would echo Caspar David Friedrich’s early 19th-century painting “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog,” while a fishing village on the White Sea looks back to 17th-century Dutch landscape painting.

A view of a Soviet-era park references social realist painting. The high vantage point of “Motherland, Kiev” (2003) renders the perspective and landscape design of the communist-era park in its full, manic dimensions. A gargantuan statue is captured with a large cloud, perfectly centered, back-lit and gilded by the sun, framing her. Think of the Statue of Liberty, lacking elegance of any kind, but still holding important political symbols aloft.

Strangest of all within the group is an architectural folly atop a casino Mr. Moore photographed in Asbury Park, N.J. This multicolored construction looks like a wilting ruin. Mr. Moore’s straight-on view includes, in the foreground, a rooftop rain puddle where cattails have taken root, and a refreshing sliver of real sky at the picture’s top edge. The casino picture is his homage to an obscure 19th-century American trompe l’oeil painter named John Peto.

Mr. Moore has been building a distinguished career in art photography since the 1980s. During this time, his approach to the medium followed the lines of “classic” art photography espoused by the Museum of Modern Art between about 1939 and 1980. Because it is based on a conceptual framework, Mr. Moore’s current project departs from this tradition. He exercises impressive skill in putting the view camera at the center of a project that explores the nature of representation in various eras and cultures.

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On view at Betty Cuningham, Edgar Martins’s auspicious first American exhibition presents works from two recent series, “Dystopia” and “The Accidental Theorist.” Although they look completely different, both series employ straight photography in the tradition of Edward Weston. Mr. Martins used a view camera and available light, neither arranging nor staging.

In the beautiful color photographs of “Dystopia,” what appears to be atmospheric mist is actually smoke from fires in Portugese forests, burning while the photographer took long exposures of one minute or more. The circumstances are not given, but “Dystopia” should be understood as much as ecological activism as fine art. Medium-large as contemporary photography goes, the prints measure 353/8 inches by 44 7/8 inches.

In contrast, the nocturnal beach scenes in “The Accidental Theorist” are striking because of their artificiality. The c-type prints are mounted, fastidiously, perfectly, without glass or framing of any kind, onto supports that enhance the impression that one is looking at digitally altered or machinemade illusionist paintings. At 26 inches by 32 5/8 inches, each one is about the size of a comfortable easel painting. But no, these are straight photographs.

In these photographs, also taken in Portugal, scale is peculiar. The space is vast yet flat. The picture plane is strictly divided into top and bottom. In “Untitled (From ‘The Accidental Theorist’),” a pitch-black night sky looms over a swath of pale sand where tiny umbrellas are staked upright, while a stretch of umber-hued sand darkens the foreground. The umbrellas cast crisp shadows to the left due to an extremely bright, artificial light source that illuminates the beach from somewhere off to the right. This light could be part of the security system for a high-end resort. Its strobelike effect renders the sea invisible. More ominously, the stars are invisible, the sky reduced to a pictorial backdrop.

Moore until January 27 (535 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, third floor, 646-230-9610);

Martins until January 13 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).