Tina Barney is Edith Wharton with a view camera. Both women began by focusing on the social group they knew best, a stratum of upper-class WASPs, and paid great attention to the appurtenances of rank. Wharton’s view tended to be tragic, Ms. Barney’s is lighter; her subjects have a casual elegance that she portrays with affectionate irony. Both women recorded their travels in Britain and France. But Ms. Barney has now gone further from her native ground. Janet Borden Inc. has up 12 chromogenic prints, some 24 inches by 30 inches and some 48 inches by 60 inches, from her 2006 “China Visit.”

Maybe she is not so far from home after all. Ms. Barney is interested in culture and social relationships, not geography. What is Chinese about “The Jingle Composer” besides his face? This man of about 40 wears blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a black Tshirt with an unnecessarily complex logo sewn conspicuously on its hem; he holds a lit cigarette in one hand over an ashtray he holds with the other, and his left eyebrow is pierced to accommodate a metal ring. This has more to do with contemporary Western faddism than any inheritance from the dynastic layers of China’s past. Maybe the faded red curtain behind him hints of chinoiserie. And the tenuous smile seems appropriate to the low order of creativity that his profession requires.

“The Caddies” are two demure middle-aged Chinese women posed on the manicured grass of a golf course. Behind them is a water hazard, and beyond that a sand trap, then a fairway with some golfers, and in the far distance a sparkling high-rise modern city. It could be Florida. The caddies wear sneakers, trousers, identical pale yellow long-sleeved shirts, canvas satchels, and curious red bonnets designed to protect them from the sun. One woman holds the arm of the other, as if for security in this attractive but alien landscape where they earn their livings. The picture is a very slightly comic and a very slightly elegiac study of displacement.

On the other hand, “The Opera” could only be Chinese. A young couple poses in traditional clothes, he in a pale gray gown with a mandarin collar, she in a pale peach dress with a mandarin collar. He holds a large open fan. They stand on individual raised platforms on either side of a stand draped with a turquoise cloth decorated with delicate flowers. Behind them is a screen of oversize flowers in exquisite shades of pink and green, held in an intricately carved wooden frame. Their mannered postures and the raked lighting indicate a performance of some sort; the picture is an authentic representation of a highly artificial art form.

In “The Garden Hose,” the pale blue plastic garden hose is an intrusion amid the traditional garden ornaments. A grandmother looks out of the frame rather than at two little girls in stylish Western children’s clothes. Wherever Ms. Barney travels, she brings her native sensitivity to cultural and social dynamics. And she knows how to use color anywhere.

***

The retrospective of Leonard Freed’s work at the Leica Gallery is a memorial exhibition. Like many Magnum photographers, Freed (1929–2006) was a photojournalist whose pictures frequently made art of the news. I knew him a bit in the last few years, and remember an occasion when he was at our house to celebrate the sheva brachos, the seven blessings observant Jews recite for newlyweds, of a young couple we were both friendly with. The ceremony was new to him, but he paid close attention. About his lack of knowledge, he said that when he was growing up, “The Judaism in our house was Stalinism.” Yet many of the pictures at Leica have a religious character.

The first five images are from his 1954 series on New York City chasidim. At that time, chasids were Old World figures who somehow survived the war to dance around their rebbe in Crown Heights. There are pictures of Catholic priests in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, including the famous 1958 shot of two priests in a snowball fight. There’s a preacher in South Carolina (1964), a funeral in New Orleans (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Baltimore (1964), and “Praying on a Train, Israel” (1973). Freed must have been drawn to what was foreign to him.

But given his early political orientation, his extensive coverage of the civil rights movement — coverage that frequently put his safety in jeopardy — is not surprising. Nor is his affectionate “Hydrant, Harlem” (1963) of gleeful black boys under the spray. Nor is another well-known picture, “Wall Street, New York City” (1956), a surreal image of people moving like automatons on sidewalks in the center of capitalism. Nor is the wicked “Men with briefcases, Wall Street, New York City” (1989), where we see a mass of bodies and briefcases, but no heads.

There is the lyrical beauty of two skinny cats on the empty street in “Early in the morning, Naples” (1958), and the brutality of a corpse in the gutter and a man with a gun in “Conflict, Bucharest, Romania” (1989). The Ku Klux Klan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, a Bedouin father and son, a fashion show in Amsterdam, a NYPD cop with a puppet: If you are a Magnum photographer, you get to see a lot. Leonard Freed saw a lot, and he recorded what he saw in a straightforward but emphatic manner. He once told a mutual friend that when he composed a picture, he thought in terms of building a temple. Even those with no formal religious training, if they have an impulse, find a way to make devotions.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Barney until June 16 (560 Broadway, between Spring and Prince streets, 212-431-0166);

Freed until June 16 (670 Broadway, between Bond and Great Jones streets, 212-777-6960).