For my last year of high school, 1955-6, my parents sent me to a Connecticut boarding school that was hell. Resolved at last to break out, one weekend I took advantage of the blanket permission they had sent the school Gauleiters that allowed me to visit family friends in Hartford, and instead got on a bus for New York City. I spent 24 hours photographing in the confines of Times Square with my Kodak Retina IIIA, returning somewhat coffee-logged to Connecticut to develop my film in the darkroom of the photography club, of which I was the president. (Actually, I was the photography club.) “At the Crossroads of Desire: A Times Square Centennial” at the AXA Gallery reminded me of all that misery and flight.

It has been (just) more than a century since the New York Times completed its building at the intersections of Seventh Avenue, Broadway, and 42nd Street, and Longacre Square had its name changed. Last week’s New Year’s celebration was the 100th there, in fact, as the tradition was begun by the Times to celebrate its new home. The AXA exhibition examines the ways Times Square became “the laboratory for new forms of entertainment, communications, advertising, urban planning and vice.” There are many sorts of artifacts on display; playbills, posters, a menu from Sardi’s, historical photographs, a gargoyle from the Times building, movie clips, and two cases of postcards. Most of the postcards have the picture showing, but some have the message side up: “Saw Broadway last night – some sight – had a fine trip, feeling fine, feeling fine – give best wishes to all.” That’s postmarked August 23, 1924.

But it wasn’t the prospect of seeing a Broadway show or a movie that drew me to Times Square, I wasn’t much interested in either. It was because I knew it was a great place to take pictures. And I knew that because the annuals that were such an important part of the photography scene at mid-century always had many exciting pictures of the Great White Way; they tended to be grainy, harsh in contrast, and frequently blurred, but they captured the excitement of the place and the people who washed in and washed out of it, mostly pathetic folk desperate to have their lives touched by glamour. Times Square was to photographers in the postwar era what the rural South had been during the Depression: It was where many of the forces at work in the culture were most nakedly evident, and so where you could go to make your reputation.

A lot of those photographers are in the AXA exhibition. Louis Faurer and Ted Cromer are well represented, which is appropriate since they are best remembered for their pictures of Times Square. Faurer’s “Convertible on Broadway” (c.1949) has many of the elements typical of Times Square pictures of that era: the lights of the theater marquees, the lights of the theater marquees reflected on an automobile, and youth out larking. We see best the three girls in the front seat, white, middleclass teenagers, maybe from Queens or Long Island or New Jersey, in for a good time in the city – very ordinary looking but very happy. It must be the girl behind the wheel whose parents own the car or one of the boys would be driving.

“Family, Times Square, N.Y.C.” (1949-50), shown in the exhibition in a black-and-white print, though it was shot in color, is very different in tone. Again the people are white, maybe lower middle-class (the father has a tattoo). The men wear short-sleeve shirts open at the collar, the mother and daughter are not stylish. The parents do not seem especially pleased about being where they are, and the children are uncertain. Something about the lights and the gaud they find off-putting. They look like churchgoers who took a wrong turn and found themselves in an illuminated Sodom.

Ted Croner’s “Home of the Brave” (1947-8) makes ironic use of an enormous billboard advertising the war movie; silhouetted against it are three men in business suits and snap brimmed hats. His “Times Square Montage” (1947-8) is a jazzy concoction of lights and signs and moving traffic.

Several other New York School photographers are represented. In the show are William Klein’s “Selwyn, 42nd Street, New York” (1965), Leon Levinstein’s “Times Square, New York” (c. 1950) – this time the two guys in the convertible with the immaculate white-walls are black; Weegee’s “‘I did my bit, Did you?’ ‘Is this strip necessary?’ Penny Edwards thinks it is, as she gave her clothes to the United Nations Clothing” (undated) – don’t ask; and Garry Winogrand’s “Untitled (El Morocco Club – Joe DiMaggio with friends)” (1955), which captures one of the swankier places to hang out in the area. The New York School photographers made a major impact on the practice of photography at midcentury and the site they haunted to refine their aesthetic was Times Square.

But they are certainly not the only important photographers who did. There are three pictures by Andreas Feininger, “Small movie specializing in sexy films” (1940), “Theatrical Make Up” (1975), and “All Star Agency” (1984) all taken in his clear, analytic style. There is Berenice Abbott’s “Father Duffy, Times Square” (April 14, 1937), a surreal image of the priest’s statue before its unveiling, when it was still covered with tarpaulin tightly bound with rope; Inge Morath’s “Times Square” (1957), a llama with its head sticking out of a car window; Dennis Stock’s “James Dean” (1956), the actor with his shoulders hunched up against the rain; and Joel Meyerowitz’s “West 46th Street, NYC” (1976), a complex color shot, and, yes – of, course – Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day At Times Square” (August 15, 1945), the picture that assured the country the war truly over.

There are some photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, when 42nd Street was a running sore of social pathology, but I missed Michael Ackerman’s darkly brilliant pictures of Broadway whores and hustlers, wretches who sold love and pleasure as commodities and seemed so little happy themselves. And if I can ever get around to organizing all my negatives and proof sheets, I hope somewhere toward the bottom of the pile I’ll find the rolls from my teenage all-nighter in Times Square: There was a shot of a guy mooning over a cup and saucer in a 24-hour coffee shop I want to look at again.

Until March 26 (787 Seventh Avenue, at 51st Street, 212-554-4818).