My wife throws out nothing. The advantage of this is that when fashions change she has only to go to the back of her closet to be in style again, because everything new was once old. So, too, in art.

In the 19th century, photographic plates were not fast enough to stop motion, so subjects were either inanimate or rigidly posed. Narrative scenes were carefully staged tableaux vivants, frequently lachrymose Victorian families gathered around a beautifully dying child or vaguely campy recreations of dramatic biblical moments. In the 20th century, faster films freed photographers to shoot action as it occurred, but at the century’s end a vogue for staged pictures reemerged. “Chapters,” the exhibition of photographs by Caitlin Atkinson at Foley Gallery, is work in that genre.

Staging her images lets the photographer, like the poet or painter, bode forth her dreams and nightmares. Ms. Atkinson, judging by the eight Chromogenic pictures on display, has difficulty sleeping nights, not beset by horror so much as by embarrassment. She – or, more properly, a character she portrays – is the subject of each of the pictures, and when the situation in which she has placed herself is not troubling, it rises at best to the enigmatic. Each picture is titled “Chapter Such-and-such,” which implies it is part of a sequence – a novel or biography, perhaps – but the images are not ordered, and their titles are likely intended as illustrations of a recurring dilemma.

In “Chapter 17” (June 2004), Ms. Atkinson is at the beach. In the foreground, three beach towels lie side by side on the sand; beyond are small breaking waves, ocean, and sky. The left towel is empty and the attractive woman who occupied it is headed, naked, into the waves. The woman on the towel to the right is also naked. Ms. Atkinson, a pleasant-looking 27-year-old, is standing at the middle towel wearing the bottom of a bathing suit and a long-sleeved blouse. She faces the camera, and we can see that although her hands are poised to unbutton her blouse she is reluctant to do so. Why? Not as busty as the others? Moral qualms? Something is making her self-conscious: Maybe she had agreed to go with her friends to the nudist beach for the first time, and now that she is there she regrets so casually scuttling modesty. It is a touching picture.

“Chapter 8” (August 2002), is a minor domestic tragedy – burnt lasagna. Ms. Atkinson occupies most of the picture: She wears a Betty Crocker-ish apron with pink flowers over a pale green blouse, and holds the pan of incinerated pasta in pale green pot holders. All the other pictures were shot outdoors in diffused light, but this was taken in a kitchen in harsh side lighting that throws her figure into high relief. She faces the camera full front although her eyes are cast downward to the blackened lasagna that she presents as an offering of some sort, a sacrifice to the goddess of culinary disasters. The center of attention is the expression on her face: innocent, troubled, quizzical, and anxious to find an excuse for her immolated dinner.

In “Chapter 2” (April 2002), Ms. Atkinson is being assaulted by the geese and ducks and pigeons to which she was feeding breadcrumbs; here she exits to the left of the frame with a look of fear and loathing. She stands a small figure in “Chapter 5” (April 2004). Isolated in a deserted shopping mall parking lot, big plastic shopping bags in each hand, she looks for the car that is supposed to take her home. (Ms. Atkinson lives in California, where shopping malls and automobiles have more cultural weight than in New York City.) In “Chapter 31” (November 2004), she stands with an open umbrella against the backdrop of an orchard and watches as some paintings burn in a campfire site. (Ms. Atkinson is also a painter.)

The scenarios Ms. Atkinson sets up to photograph herself in are slight but not insignificant, gently humorous but not without import. To the extent her work is a feminist critique of some sort, it is accomplished with a wry sensibility and not ideological bombast. To the extent her character is meant to be a more broadly representative Everyperson, I am reminded of Hart Crane’s poem “Chaplinesque”:

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

Ms. Atkinson will no doubt make her “meek adjustments” to whatever situations she finds herself in as she constructs her succeeding chapters.

***

I want to mention the exhibition of portraits by “Seydou Keita: The Image King of Africa” at the Sean Kelly gallery because I was in Keita’s hometown, Bamako, Mali, in 1972. Keita (1923-2001) was ordered in 1960 to close his studio and work for the newly independent government, so he was not one of the photographers working when I walked around the old colonial capital taking Kodachrome snapshots. But he worked in conditions similar to those photographers who, like the barbers and other service providers, had crude placards illustrating what they did and more frequently than not worked outdoors.

Bamako in those days was an unlikely venue for an inspired portrait photographer, a small town made largely of mud and plaster and surrounded by arid savannah. On the periphery of the marketplace, goldsmiths used primitive furnaces to make exquisite jewelry of such delicate filigree it seemed magical that they could work it without a magnifying glass. A trader sold me a colorful woven pillbox hat with a little knob on top that the Muslims wore. The neon sign at Au Paradis, the open-air nightclub at the Grand Hotel, drew people who stood like moths outside the fence to listen to the music. The newest sensation was a generic modern hotel built on the outskirts by the Egyptian government; it had a bowling alley that attracted the town swells. People like these came to Keita to be memorialized.

Keita took the portraits on display at Sean Kelly in the 1950s, when West Africa was on the cusp of independence. His subjects, almost entirely women in this selection, do not exude confidence. They swathe themselves in the fabrics made specifically for the African trade, deck themselves with traditional jewelry, and clutch pocket books, or radios, or books – tokens of European civilization. They are people in transition, but not certain to where. They confront the lens of the camera as if it were a crystal ball.

Atkinson until March 4 (547 W. 27th Street, fifth floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-244-9081).

Keita until March 4 (528 W. 29th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-239-1181).