The title of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s new show, “Lucky Thirteen,” is at once ironic and melancholy. The 13 strip-club pole dancers depicted here do not seem particularly lucky, despite being immortalized by one of our best-known photographers. Each woman appears alone, onstage, apparently dancing for an audience of one – the camera lens.

Of course, for the man who watches, these girls are always dancing for him alone. Something of that solipsism infects these pictures, despite their technical brilliance. Is there a more cliched subject for a photographer today than strippers and sex workers? Probably not. Still, when the photographer is as canny and generally unerring as PLD, the cliches bear some scrutinizing.

Mr. diCorcia made his name by creating fictions, narrative images that mimicked the look and spontaneity of street photography. He captured his family in the early 1970s, then strangers in “Hustlers” and “Streetwork.” In recent efforts, such as “Heads” (2000), the narrative impulse was pushed aside somewhat by baroque lighting effects. People love to note the otherworldly, heaven-sent light in his pictures. The primary light in “Lucky Thirteen” again falls from above, enhancing the theatrical aura of the stage and causing the dancers’ skin to glow as if from within.

But here, instead of narrative, Mr. diCorcia seems more interested in the theater of the mind, a kind of stylized psychology. I would call it portraiture, except that the women come off as tragic actors: Heavily made-up, they wear their forlorn expressions like masks from the commedia del arte.

Large – 5.25-by-4-feet – and in color, the prints are identified by the dancers’ stage names. Yet it is the poses that first strike the eye. In each case, the pole bisects the image, providing an axis around which the woman twists. Hannah, in a black bra and outrageous spiked heels, lies horizontally in mid-air, supported only by her right arm and scissoring thighs. She stares up, past an unlit bulb, as if wondering where the strong light is falling from. Topless, Tennille hangs upside-down, an inverted hood ornament, one arm flung out and the other held dramatically to her long blond hair. In the background, at the height of her shadowed crotch, a red neon light spells out “Scandals” in cursive letters that rhyme with the curve of her hip and the angle of her knee.

Although Juliet Ms. Muse is entirely naked, and Logan, hanging like a bat or insect, frames the juncture of her legs with her hand, these pictures are not highly sexualized. This is due in part to the mask-like expressions worn by the dancers and in part to the fact that, with so much of each picture hidden in darkness, you tend to focus on details that distract from sex – even when those details are sexual.

Juliet’s toes, for instance, curl around the pole much like the crescent tattoo above the strip of her pubic hair; the shape is echoed again in the curve of her right arm around her head. Another dancer named Sin has pierced nipples and wears a dog collar, but the picture’s focus rests in the folds and puckers of skin on her belly, evidence of a recent pregnancy. The emptiness of the rooms, the sterility of the situations – none of it seems especially sexy. The contortions here add up to athleticism rather than ardor.

Ultimately, Mr. diCorcia’s concern seems to be the tension between movement and stasis, light and dark, as in Baroque paintings. We’re asked to contemplate legs straining to hold a woman still; all sorts of muscles ap pear. Aside from the otherworldly light that falls on the women’s bodies, there is neon above – the graffiti of red and green squiggles above Sin, the red dots and blue bars above Amber – and, at times, an infernal red below. Hair, caught in the glow, often plays a starring role: Sin’s Medusa-like curls arrayed like worms of light, the cascade of Lola’s brunette locks, the wave of Logan’s tresses, the way Juliet’s hair folds like drapery.

That the women are posed like cherubs in mid-air, and are upside-down like fallen angels, suggests the iconography of Christianity. It’s a suggestion strongly reinforced by the white light above and the red light below. But I wouldn’t want to make too much of the religious allusions. To me, they seem more a by-product of the baroque sensibility at play here than the motivation for it.

Mr. diCorcia is not making a moral judgment here. Religion provides the look, modern irony the ethos: These women are both fallen and uplifted, desirable and imperfect, straining and still, sad or perhaps taken up by the ecstasy of exertion. That lack of judgment, along with the way that so much about these clear, simple pictures remains uncertain – in tension rather than intentional – is what makes them so unsettlingly powerful. It is we who are lucky.

Until October 8 (534 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-759-7999).