Begun in 1985, the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography series was founded at a time when legendary former photography director John Szarkowski’s crusade, to make photography a fully accepted fine art, was more than complete. A canon had been established, and a new series could consciously seek works posterior to that canon. In 1994, for example, the New Photography show launched the career of Abelardo Morrell, with his camera obscura experiments. The 1996 show introduced Thomas Demand to America. These shows assumed that photography was as established as painting, and as ready for something “New.”

Last year, after a six-year gap, the museum resumed the series. “New Photography 2006” fulfills its mission more obviously than last year’s revival show, which featured kitschy still-lifes; portraits of people in their apartments; staged, street-inflected videos, and photographs of buildings augmented by architectural sketches. Though this year’s show, like its predecessors, is more anthology than survey, it includes three individuals who all happen to enjoy formal play more than rich subject matter.

The least winning of the three, Jonathan Monk, hardly acts like a photographer at all. For one slide show, Mr. Monk asked his mother to select unfamiliar slides from his father’s collection. The resulting pictures, of people and places his father visited before he married Mr. Monk’s mother, are inert. When viewing portraits, I often wonder who the sitter was, and what the artist thought of her. But these are pictures of people Mr. Monk cannot identify, and any curiosity as to who they were belongs to him, not me.

Elsewhere, Mr. Monk displays not photographs, but descriptions of photographs. He called up his little sister, and asked her to describe the photos hanging in the family home. Her descriptions are charmingly demotic — “You wearing stupid glasses”; “Dad standing on his head with uncle Sonny holding his feet” — but, in Monk’s presentation, coy. This take on John Baldessari’s text paintings substitutes Baldessari’s art-world jokes with one family’s inside jokes.

Around the corner, in a more open gallery, hangs far more compelling work, by Barbara Probst. At first I was skeptical: The pictures looked stylish, their conceit merely clever. The first work I looked at, a pair of tall inkjet prints, one color and one monotone, featured several youthful characters in the act of photographing one another. They are each crouched, as if to get the best angle on the other, also crouching, for the action shot. Only two figures are visible in each picture, and in both the middle figure, a young woman with long bangs and a trendy striped dress, crowds the frame. Yet the stripes on her dress lend a lot of strength to the composition, and they handily unite the color picture with its black-and-white neighbor.

More importantly, the stripes, which scale away from the viewer, up the woman’s hunched back, tease at the opart element in Ms. Probst’s work. Further down the wall, she juxtaposes a gritty view of Chelsea rooftops with a picture of a jaunty young woman, dressed in black pants and a white hoodie, striding in front of an Alpine landscape. A second glance shows that, in the corner of the Chelsea shot, the same girl is striding in front of an Alpine backdrop. Now her jauntiness begins to make sense. Wearing her monochrome outfit, she has stepped out of Chelsea and into a fairyland. Ms. Probst’s artifice, so frankly displayed, seems to underline the winsomeness of this escape.

On the opposite wall, Ms. Probst has four pictures, each of the same woman at the same instant, but in four different contexts: in a monochrome garden, next to the Empire State Building, in miniature on a page, and under a threatening blue eye. The young woman’s posture, with her hands behind her neck, her elbows protectively forward, and her face looking apprehensively up at the looming eye, confirms the “Alice in Wonderland” verve suggested by the sequence of backdrops.

Around another corner hang Jules Spinatsch’s documentary photographs of World Economic Forums in Davos, Switzerland, and in New York, and of the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. Most of these pictures, though sometimes beautiful, rely too much on the “gotcha” critique of consumer society in which almost any expedient — a roadblock, a news wagon, a boarded-up window — appears damning. It is surprising, then, that his “Panorama” is the most impressive piece in this small show. Composed of square photos from three programmed surveillance cameras, shooting at dawn before the 2003 Davos conference, “Panorama” presents a cynical and robotic take on photography, yet the composite emphasizes human values — of warmth on a winter night, of refuge at a bus stop, of the literal difference between night and day.

In MoMA’s new building, the exhibition space used by “New Photography 2006” is literally surrounded by the history of photography, in the form of MoMA’s permanent photography collection. The fundamental difference of intent between those rooms and these is palpable. The wall text in the permanent collection’s most formally interesting room, labeled “Aspects,” claims that “photographic description, precise and persuasive as it may be, is rooted quite literally in a single point of view.” If anything unites the work of Ms. Probst and Mr. Spinatsch, it is their repudiation of that claim.

Until January 8 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).