The title of “Family Pictures,” a compact exhibition of recent photography and video acquisitions, is somewhat of a misnomer. Most of the imagery is of children, but the children are related to the photographer in only a few of the works. The title is meant to evoke the traditional qualities of innocence, intimacy, and idealism associated with family photography, which many of the pieces on display consciously work against. The color and monumental scale of the images, due to advances in printing quality, is impressive, but it forces the viewer to step back from the work in order to absorb its impact. This physical and emotional distance explains the slightly frigid feel of this eclectic and sometimes controversial collection.

There is a significant sampling of contemporary artists’ exploration of the experience of childhood, either through self-portraiture, video, or even narrative photographs. Patty Chang’s poetic video installation, “In Love,” a remarkable evocation of the symbiosis of parent and child, combines all three. Dual screens present Ms. Chang with her father on the right and her mother on the left. Both videos, played in reverse, begin with Ms. Chang silently locked in what appears to be a deep kiss with each parent. As their faces shift back and forth, a small white onion emerges, and is passed back and forth between parent and child first with the mouths and then with the fingers.

The Changs’ locked gazes, shared physiognomy, and tearing eyes eloquently express the separation anxiety that remains with us well into adulthood. It is of course disconcerting to watch Ms. Chang enjoy what appears to be a passionate kiss with her parents. But as the tape plays, discomfort yields to a growing recognition that her parents’ consensual participation in Ms. Chang’s art-making is, in fact, a demonstration of love.

One of the most powerful still images is what appears to be a vintage black-and-white photograph. British artist Gillian Wearing had a silicone prosthetic mask made from a studio portrait taken when she was three. In the photograph of herself wearing the mask, the adult is trapped within the soft contours of a toddler’s unsmiling face, her wary gaze visible through the mask’s eyeholes.

A more provocative self-portrait features the artist Catherine Opie nursing her toddler son. Ms. Opie is well-known for her formal portraits of transgender and homosexual individuals and families. Here, she reinterprets the Renaissance’s motif of a “Madonna in maestà.” In the large color photograph, Ms. Opie’s heavy naked upper body fills the frame. With jetblack hair cropped close to her head, she turns her face in profile. Her tattooed arms cradle the curled-up child latched onto her left breast. Across her chest, scars spell out the word “pervert,” which she scratched into her skin years before in a prior performance piece. With this textual device Ms. Opie pre-empts her critics ready to accuse her of perverting sacred imagery.

A large number of photographs feature solitary figures of children, some of them eerily divorced from reality. The somber, pale faces of the young children in Loretta Lux’s portraits are both digitally and manually finessed, giving the figures the waxy appearance of a plastic doll. The Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra approaches her portraits of children as figure studies. Placing her nearly nude, early adolescent models against the backdrop of a body of water, the photographs collectively emphasize the shared epicene beauty of the bodies of young boys and girls.

Sally Mann famously — or notoriously, depending on whom you ask — photographed her handsome, dramatically charismatic children in the nude. But now that the original Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields, is all grown up and hawking Crest toothpaste, are Ms. Mann’s images really so shocking anymore? There is an erotic charge that animates Ms. Mann’s portraits, but it is the preternaturally adult faces, not the children’s attenuated bodies, that spark the fire. Further, Ms. Mann, who has a virtuosic control of shadow and light, photographs her children in the most tender way. The sfumato effects and radiant lighting transform her children’s bodies into figural allegories of impermanence.

Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, one of Ms. Mann’s most important influences, hang on the opposite wall, creating a dialogue between Ms. Mann’s brood and Mapplethorpe’s own contributions to the controversial category of the nude child. Here, the frank depiction of the genitalia, especially little Rosie’s, seems almost innocent, especially when Mapplethorpe’s imagery is compared to “Florentin,” Nathalie Djurberg’s Claymation video of childhood trauma and aggression. Seated on a lovely carved stone bench, Rosie’s round eyes stare at the lens. Her mouth drops open. Clearly she is transfixed. And despite her missing underpants, it is hard to miss the playful aspects of the photograph and the photographer’s awareness of his subject’s vulnerability.

There is a warmth and vitality in both Ms. Mann’s and Mr. Mapplethorpe’s portraits that is noticeably absent in the more recent photographic work on display in “Family Pictures.” Even Thomas Sturth’s valorizing portrait of the family of the German artist Gerhard Richter is fraught with tension.

The move to exorcise all sentimentality out of family portraiture is a worthwhile project. Yet “Family Pictures” demonstrates, in its absence of warmth, that art that acknowledges the ardent force of family kinship is now the most radical.

Tomorrow until April 16 (1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).