In August, the photography galleries frequently show pictures of travel and vacation, such as in the “Easy Rider: Road Trips Through America” show at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, which was reviewed in this space last week, or “Leisure,” an exhibition of work by Karine Laval, presently up at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery. But every trip and every vacation implies a home from which the traveler sets out, and to which, in most cases, he will return. “Home: An Exhibition of Photographs” at the Alice Austen House Museum, curated by Staten Island photographer Christine Osinski, presents work by nine artists of places they have experienced as home, or imagined as homes of others.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

Robert Frost’s familiar aphorism from “The Death of the Hired Man” reminds us that home is a social construct as much as an address on a street map, and since the social unit typically resident in a home is a family, it is bound to be the site of complex feelings. Tracey Baran’s witty “Me on Lawn” (1997) will resonate with everyone who was once young and longed for independence. The picture is a worm’s-eye view of the photographer lying on the green grass in front of a white world-weariness: It is her mother.

A gray-haired woman stands on the little porch of the white clapboard house with her arms akimbo. She wears chino shorts and a red, short-sleeved shirt that is the brightest object in the picture. She looks at her daughter with an expression of benign puzzlement. There is no overt censure in her expression, and we can assume that the mother’s abiding offense to her daughter is simply her own motherliness. “Oh, Mom,” the woman on the lawn seems to be thinking with a sense of ritual persecution.

Darin Mickey’s mother is the subject of his “Clipping Flowers” (2005). She stands in the midst of a flower garden edged with railroad ties set in a lawn next to the tree-lined street in what appears to be a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. The plumpish middle-aged woman wears a formless white gown with long sleeves that set her off from the surrounding green, and she holds a yellow flower in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. Her body is rigid and her expression unaccountably sour. It is an odd image of filial ambivalence.

The two men, father and son, exercising their Second Amendment rights in Mr. Mickey’s “Cleaning Guns, Kansas” (2001), show their respect for domestic propriety by turning back the yellow cloth on the dining room table to protect it from the lubricant in the aerosol can standing next to the can of Bud. The two most conspicuous features of the image are the red T-shirts they wear and the studied concentration with which they work on their automatic pistols. Are the guns used for sport, or are they necessary to maintain the inviolability of the home?

Home is inconceivable without the meals served there, and the food prepared inconceivable without a refrigerator to keep it from spoiling. Jennifer Williams’s series of fridges views the white metal boxes as totems of domesticity, the contemporary equivalent of a hearth. The open doors of “Mom’s Fridge” (2007) reveal containers with familiar brand names — Edy’s, Ragu, Heinz, Hellman’s — and a bottle of 1% low-fat milk. The savor of these commercial foods must be an indistinguishable part of Ms. Williams’s memories of home.

Brian Zimmerman’s backlit black-and-white photograph of a rusting “Swingset” (2007) in a yard overgrown with weeds is drenched with nostalgia for a distant childhood. Reuben Cox’s images of log cabins made without the benefit of power tools illustrate the effort men are willing to make to create a place of habitation. Marcia Due has two very different takes on the theme of home: Her pictures “Rensselaer County, NY” (1998) and (2000) show wood frame houses slowly collapsing, the supple wood seeming to melt as the abandoned homes fall in upon themselves in sad heaps. Her “Staten Island” (1979), on the other hand, shows five children smiling for the camera as they stand in a backyard above ground swimming pool, the suburban working class’s alternative to a rural swimming hole. To emphasize the imparity, the foreground is taken up with the electric pump and plastic hoses that maintain the pool’s water.

Ms. Osinski is represented in the show she curated by three photographs that were seen in her “Notes From West Brighton” exhibition last summer at the Silo Gallery. This body of work shows Staten Island as the borough of New York City that is most like the rest of America. In writing about her “Men Working on House” (1983), I described the pretentious portico that is the main feature of an otherwise undistinguished two-story house. “The portico is tacked on to a house with which it has no organic relationship. It is meant to put us in mind of the colonnaded porticos of magnificent Southern plantations remembered from ‘Gone With the Wind’ and, beyond them, the classical buildings of Rome and Greece. The portico is absurd and endearing, a marker of the aspirations of the people who will live in this house and — importantly — pay the mortgage for the next 30 years. Ms. Osinski does not score points on its pretensions.”

It ain’t Tara, but it’s home.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until September 1 (2 Hylan Blvd., Staten Island, 718-816-4506).