The building of tall buildings is one of the defining aspects of the culture of New York City. A corollary of this is that if you walk around New York – Manhattan, anyway – and the city is not in one of its intermittent recessions, you are likely to encounter buildings under construction. Maybe you have to cross the street because the sidewalk is closed, but that gives you a better vantage point from which to marvel at the work.

Stanley Greenberg has spent more time looking than most of us, as his “Under Construction” show at Candace Dwan Gallery attests. Mr. Greenberg might be categorized as an architectural photographer, except that his work rarely presents the simple portrait of a building. He is an anatomist who gets under the skin of the built environment to see what makes it work, what holds it together, and how its scattered parts may relate to the whole.

Mr. Greenberg first came to attention with the 1998 book “Invisible New York,” a project that showed the beauty of the city’s water tunnels, the infrastructure of its bridges, and the cavernous rooms where powerful machinery hums as it makes things happen. “Waterworks” (2003) continued his exploration of the tunnels, but also took him upstate to shoot the reservoirs, dams, waterways, and control units that make it possible for us to brush our teeth, shower, and flush our waste back to nature.

“Under Construction” presents 15 black-and-white photographs, each 30 inches by 40 inches, of various building sites around the United States and Canada. None of the pictures gives a sense of what the completed building will look like. We see at most a few floors at a time, and frequently less. There are steel beams, concrete planes, and wooden trusses, at first glance seemingly random. I was reminded of Lee Friedlander’s pictures of apple trees, in which the photographer thrust his camera in among the branches and found design in their twistings. But we know buildings have plans, and our minds work to find order in Mr. Greenberg’s pictures.

My colleague James Gardner, the architecture critic of The New York Sun, met me at the Dwan Gallery, and he looked at the pictures from the perspective of his discipline. For instance “Untitled, New York, New York” (2004), a weave of steel beams,right angles, and diagonals, seemed to me to draw inspiration from the paintings of Piet Mondrian, as well as the drawings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. James identified it as Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, which was like recognizing someone from his chest X-rays. “Untitled, Denver, Colorado” (2005), where successive tiers of beams in the background have little apparent relationship to the grid of arched steel beams soaring upward in the background, looks destined for an airport or a sports stadium; it will be part of Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum.

James thought the pictures were evidence of a lingering modernist preference for process over finished product. The fulfilled intention might be banal, but constructing it was not. He also found a correlation in the current taste for Deconstructivism, the architectural style that designs buildings that have no visual logic. Continuing this line of thought, he said Mr. Greenberg’s photographs were a way of falsifying and disregarding the architects’ intentions – of editing them.

Allowing that all this is true, I think there is something else at play here. These pictures seem closer to Oriental calligraphy or to certain works of Abstract Expressionism than to any recognizable category of architectural photography.

Mr. Greenberg differs substantially from Ezra Stoller, for instance, who photographed the great buildings that went up in the middle decades of the 20th century as ideal realizations of what had first appeared in the imaginations of their architects. And whereas Lewis Hine’s series on the Empire State Building is a paean to the skill and courage of the workers who erected it, there are no workers – or anyone else – in Mr. Greenberg’s pictures. (There aren’t even any empty coffee cups or McDonald’s containers to indicate they were there.)

Rather than put his camera at the service of the buildings, Mr. Greenberg has put the buildings at the service of his camera. The specific identity of each building is beside the point, which is why the pictures are untitled.

These images are not about architecture as much as about photography – about making pictures – and the photographer’s ability to find drama even in empty skeletons of steel and concrete. Mr. Greenberg is like a guy who steals into a construction site at night and takes whatever lumber and other materials he can make off with to build his own project; it’s just that in this case the stuff is carted off on film.

Thus “Untitled, Toronto, Ontario” (2005) is a dense matrix of receding planes of rectangles and triangles made of girders. “Untitled, Akron, Ohio” (2005) contrasts a sturdy concrete shape like the base of a pyramid with steel beams that project from it. The abutting walls of “Untitled, Cambridge, Massachusetts” (2001) are made of deep concrete grids, but tease us to gauge the scale. “Untitled, New York, New York” (2002) is a pattern of little mounds of black soot on a vast concrete floor. Liberating these pictures from their context in architecture is Stanley Greenberg’s ongoing adventure.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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