There is a pervasive ambivalence in Katy Grannan’s portraits: The gaze that returns the viewer’s is a mix of coyness and exhibitionism. The images themselves oscillate between similar extremes, building a visceral sense of the present through precision while succumbing to a remoteness that results from theatricality. She has two shows up in New York right now, which, together with a show at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, constitute a body of work she calls “The Westerns.” This East Coast-born and -educated artist moved to the Bay Area several years ago, and “The Westerns” has a unifying theme in the particularity of Californian light, which, in her hands, is intense and dispassionate.

Her Salon 94 presentation features a pair of middle-aged transsexuals, Gail and Dale, while Greenberg Van Doren presents a single protagonist — a younger woman named Nicole, photographed in gutsy, flamboyant poses over an extended period of time.

Ms. Grannan finds her sitters through ads in local papers, and clearly seeks out people who are itching to share what they imagine others will view as a peculiarity — often sexual — that expresses something vital to their sense of self. Yet, at the same time, Ms. Grannan has an uncanny knack for capturing moments of doubt, cracks in a mask of defiance. Once you get used to the fact that these are big photos of odd people in forlorn places, the real subject that emerges is the negative space between individual and type, introspection and performance.

These photographs are big, typically printed at 40 by 50 inches, but their scale is complex. Through radical simplification of composition and meticulous capture of detail, they have a cinematic intimacy.

In “Gail and Dale, Pacifica” (this series is all from 2007), the friends are caught between introspection and camera-awareness. Gail, a redhead, is looking down with her hand on Dale’s shoulder. Dale’s vacant gaze hovers at a middle distance. She has white hair; they both wear white dresses, and the sand, sea, and sky behind them are bleached, all of which gives an abstract, ethereal glow to the image. But the camera manages to pick out highly literal specifics of texture and tone, such as dress fabric or creases of skin.

In “Dale, Southampton Avenue,” Dale is nude, lying on an unmade bed and casting a long shadow against a cream-colored wall. The pose recalls Goya’s “Majas” in its languor, mixing voluptuousness and indifference. A worn, somewhat frumpy body tells the tale of a struggle to find inner femininity, her hands and face still burdened by masculinity. Transsexuals are perfect subjects for Ms. Grannan as they are caught between states, being oneself ever entailing an act of defiance against nature and society, even “post op.”

Just when tolerance and technology allow a person born male to transform him/herself into a woman, women of different ages have found boyish ways to be feminine. Dale and Gail are at an age when women sometimes adopt the Senator Clinton approach of short hair and trouser suits, yet these two subjects are compelled by circumstance to cling to the trappings of the feminine with flowing dresses and Pre-Raphaelite locks that only serve to reinforce their biological origins.

A common problem among older transsexuals is economic marginalization — they lost the jobs they had as men and spent their savings on surgery — and thus they cannot afford to dress with feminine distinction. The photographs of Gail emphasize this tragicomic twist in their frumpy vulnerability. This is the odd thing about Ms. Grannan: despite their deliberation and composition, these photographs feel like an unsentimental version of the realities of their sitters’ lived experience. In comparison, Nan Goldin’s seemingly snapshot-like, diaristic, “real” photographs have the glamour of “La Cage aux Folles” or “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” Coming to the uptown show from Gail and Dale you might have had to ask the receptionist — as this viewer did — whether Nicole, too, is a transsexual. While biologically feminine, she is no Nicole Kidman. Ms. Grannan’s merciless lens captures every bump and bruise, sunburn and freckle, stretch mark and body hair, on this young, working-class woman.

In contrast to the Gail and Dale series, in which the camera sometimes seems to spy on the lives of the protagonists, the Nicole photographs project a more overt, performative collaboration between model and artist. Nicole lolls in a pinup pose in “Crissy Field Parking Lot (II),” and in a Madonna-like stretch in its pendant, “Crissy Field Parking Lot (I).” She strikes a body-builder’s pose in “Sunnydale Ave, (I),” looks like she is about to give birth in “Potrero Hill” and, in “(Afternoon II), Lombard Street,” wearing heels, a skimpy dress, and a white wig, seems to mimic a Cindy Sherman self-portrait photograph in the extremity of her grimace and pose.

In her camp scramble for odd types, Ms. Grannan has drawn comparisons with Diane Arbus. One critic named her the “legitimate heir,” an honor she lives up to in “Gail and Dale (Best Friends), Point Lobos,” where the pair face each other in matching twin outfits. But these shows, with their mix of theatricality and literalness, beg comparison less with other photographers than with two painters: Lucian Freud and Edward Hopper.

Hopper because of the lonely isolation of figures in washed-out, banal, yet observed surroundings (sparse and tawdry) that — in a kind of cruel visual democracy — receive fastidiously equal attention. Mr. Freud comes to mind particularly in the Nicole pictures because of the way forced poses sit uncomfortably with a resigned sense of physicality. Working with a medium-format camera and slow exposures, Ms. Grannan brings out a kind of anxious boredom familiar in sitters’ expressions in Freud paintings, provoked by the long hours of posing and his exacting way of painting.

This stretching of time is of the essence in Ms. Grannan. The sitters try to express themselves when they dress up or down and strike their pose, but in fact, it is in the lag between the attainment of persona and sinking back into a literal, physical self that bathos seeps in. The sitters do their utmost to project difference, but actually what comes across is a duller humanism, that we are all just people in time and space.

At Greenberg Van Doren until February 16 (730 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-445-0444);

At Salon 94 until February 23 (1 Freeman Alley, off Rivington Street, between Bowery and Chrystie streets, 212-529-7400).