Yto Barrada’s “Girl in Red” (1999) depicts a young girl in a floral dress standing before a tiled wall whose kaleidoscopic motifs radiate color like exploding fireworks.Her back to us, the girl is anonymous and faceless, and her colorful robe disappears into the wall’s intricate design, not unlike a butterfly camouflaged among vibrant flowers. Unfortunately, the accomplishment of this striking image, at once beautiful and subtly troubling, is rarely equaled in the rest of the Moroccan-French photographer’s well-intentioned but repetitious and polemical first exhibition in the United States, currently on view at the Kitchen.

The 30 photographs and two videos that comprise “A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project” all portray Ms. Barrada’s native city of Tangier, Morocco. In 1995, the European Union adopted a common, closed border, which effectively rendered all (legal) traffic across the Strait of Gibraltar, the 10-mile-wide channel separating Tangier from Spain, one way. Ms. Barrada’s images view the city through the prism of this policy. The strait is present in almost every work – sometimes literally, as in pictures of men standing by the shoulderhigh wall of the old city, gazing mournfully at the impassable water, but more often metaphorically, represented by a strong line bisecting an image, or the looming form of a wall.

In “Ceuta Border” (1999), several boys scamper up a dusty hill beyond a gap in the border fence separating Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. One companion, who remains on the Moroccan side, relishes the final drag of his cigarette. Like many of Ms. Barrada’s stronger photographs, “Ceuta Border” is hurt by its inclusion in the show, whose inflexible theme limits the possibilities for interpretation. Placed in this context, the photograph reads didactically – a lesson about the futility and desperation of illegal border crossings – as it offers the boys only bleak, hazy sky atop the hill.

Ms. Barrada’s best photographs are those that manage to transcend their restrictive metaphor. In “Man With a Stick” (1999), a black-bearded man strikes a self-mocking, grandiose pose with a wooden shaft before a wall marked by graffiti. Known as the Oracle of the Fish Market, this man is generally avoided by locals for being a bearer of bad news, and Ms. Barrada’s portrait captures the melancholy theatricality of his persona.

Like “Girl in Red,” the image conveys an aspect of Tangier’s painful isolation without relying on explicit captioning or overwrought metaphors. Ms. Barrada is a talented image maker. With time, one hopes, she will trust her photographs to speak for themselves.

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If the hard dividing line is the dominant visual motif of Ms.Barrada’s work, the gentle curve gives form to the complex visions of the Israeli photographer Barry Frydlender. In part, this has to do with the shapes that attract the artist’s eye – tire tracks veering on a beach, an open arrangement of sofas in a living room, a formation of Israeli soldiers during last summer’s Gaza pullout. But it is also a product of his unusual method of composition.

While a single exposure has one vantage point, Mr. Frydlender’s images, which are composed of 50 to 150 individual digital photographs that are seamlessly merged using Photoshop, have numerous focal points.This often results in forms more hyperbolic than linear.

Most of Mr. Frydlender’s images in his second New York show, currently at Chelsea’s Andrea Meislin Gallery, are panoramic horizontal sweeps that resemble history paintings, like “The Blessing” (2005), a festive outdoor gathering of Chasidic men. His composite technique also yields vertical images, including his portrait of a young woman, “Take a Picture of Me” (2005).

The work’s title refers to its subject’s playful challenge, upon encountering Mr. Frydlender one morning on the beach,that he photograph her,as well as the fact that his intricate composition is hardly the simple picture she expected. Re-enacting with its audience this same game of initial expectations and eventual surprise, “Take a Picture of Me” passes at first for a single exposure and discloses its composite nature only to those who patiently look. Subtle clues include the shifting focus on the woman’s arms and shoulders and a surreal, three-dimensional quality that allows her to seemingly float above the sandy beach.

Although it contains only two photographs so far, Mr. Frydlender’s “End of Occupation?” series looks more compelling than Ms. Barrada’s “Strait Project.” In “Shirat Hayam” (2005), a crescent-shape arrangement of Israeli troops confronts a makeshift settlement on a Gaza beach. Taken from a considerable distance, its title alluding both to the settlement and a biblical song, the photograph is epic in scale with multiple narratives and hundreds of characters.”Shirat Hayam”is compassionate and impartial, and gives each party to the historic event – settlers, soldiers, and even omnipresent photojournalists – equal space. But it makes no claim to comprehensiveness, a fact made explicit by the second image of the series, which Mr. Frydlender took when he turned around and faced the opposite direction.

“Waiting, 38 Years” (2005) shows a group of Palestinian Arabs – young boys, adolescents, and middle-aged men – gathered along a dirt road, also watching the evacuation. Standing behind the photographer, they serve as a reminder that his panoramic, multiperspectival image is, from their vantage point, but a single point of view, not the entire picture. In each of these photographs, Mr. Frydlender proves himself to be an empathetic but skeptical witness to history, one who is more than willing to leave polemics to preachers and politicians.

Barrada until May 20 (512 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-5793). Frydlender until May 6 (526 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, suite 214, 212-627-2552).