The most stunning of William Gedney’s photographs in the current exhibition at P.S.1 is “Brooklyn” (1969). It is unlike most of the rest of his work in this show: The print is a bit bigger (almost 10 inches by 14); there are two figures in it (the other pictures are unpopulated); and there is a much deeper perspective. The care and exquisite delicacy Gedney devoted to his picture making remains the same. That, and that like all the pictures, it was taken at night. Probably late at night.

“Brooklyn” shows us a commercial street long after the business of the day is over. The right half of the picture is taken up by the corner of what is probably a late 19th-century office building shot level with about the third floor: The stone is heavily rusticated, the frame around the window is intricately carved, and we are quite close to it.

In the street below, we see the front end of a 1960s Pontiac. On the other side of the street is another building from about the same period, four stories tall and made of brick, with a vertical neon sign (“Michaels & Co.”) on it. There are also a few smaller buildings and an empty lot with a fence in front. But what draws our attention is the two men in overcoats on the otherwise deserted sidewalk.

On the first floor of the Michaels building are two lit store windows with “Clearance” signs across their tops. One of the men has stopped to look in; his figure is bent at the waist, so we know he is looking hard at some of the sale goods, which he certainly cannot buy at this hour. The other man has passed a fire hydrant further up the sidewalk, and will soon move out of sight beyond the corner of the building to the right of the picture.

The sense of early morning quiet, of two apparently middle-class men out when everyone else is home and in bed, and of the obscured destination of the sidewalk, make an image that could be a still from a period film noir. But it is somehow finer, less scary, more profound. It is a wonderful achievement.

Almost all the other photographs are of the fronts to modest houses that Gedney shot in his travels around the country: “Detroit, Michigan” (1966), “Brooklyn, NY” (1972), “South Dakota, Night” (1966), “Cairo, NY” (1972), “San Francisco” (1975), “Knoxville, TN” (1972).The entranceway of any building is a critical liminal site, the point at which outside becomes inside, where we leave society and join family, where the public person becomes the private, and vice versa. It is where the Romans erected their lares and penates, the Jews tack up their mezuzahs, and medieval Christians carved watchful gargoyles. Gedney’s images are imbued with a sense of the mystery of the place.

If the pictures had been taken in daylight they would be very close to the Walker Evans of “American Photographs.” Their composition is in the modernist vein: simple, with attention paid to forms, texture, and volume. But the effect of the night lighting – the sharp contrasts of light and shadows from streetlamps and other artificial sources – is spectral; it adds a narrative dimension the pictures would not otherwise have.

“Knoxville, TN” (1972) is a good example of this technique. The house in “Knoxville, TN” is a two-story wood frame structure clad in asbestos siding. This is a low-end building material, but Gedney’s picture details the zigzag pattern of the tiles, making it look exotic, like the armor of a pangolin. The house is shot from the corner, so we see that on the side there is, peculiarly, only one window, and that on the second floor. The main architectural feature of the front of the house is the little porch that shields the glass-paned door; there are two turned wooden columns and gingerbread at all the corners. Although humble, the house is well maintained, the paint on the trim in good repair. The picture strains to tease out the story of the people we assume are sleeping inside.

Christopher Wool’s work, which shares the exhibition, makes an unfortunate contrast with William Gedney’s attention to his craft, his sensibility, and his modesty. The press release explains that “although Wool is best known as a painter, he has amassed a large body of black and white photographs taken at night in the streets between the Lower East Side and Chinatown.” “Amassed” is probably the right word to describe how these pictures came into being. Mr. Wool just walked along going clickity-clickity-click.

There are more than 150 Wool photographs here. They are not matted or framed, but sandwiched in glass and ganged three-deep and close together along a wall. It is hard to look at an individual picture, and the curator seems to know few if any of the images are worth paying a lot of attention to. There are overflowing dumpsters, cyclone fences, strewn gutters, parked cars, blown trash, accordion grates, graffiti, loading docks, stray dogs … stuff. Mr. Wool does not seem to have been very interested in it. The material is random and uncomposed. The inkjet prints are drained of affect, a bit menacing at first, but soon tedious. There is nothing memorable, nothing to hold us.

This is a contemporary mode. I expect Andy Warhol is to blame, and that it is a final (I hope final) derogation of the Romantic impulse, which requires the viewer to believe that one touched by the Dionysian creative afflatus is incapable of anything that is not genius. Alas, art is work.