Whoever wrote the wall texts for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960” must be a profoundly unhappy person. One after another, these labels are almost terminally depressive. Sherrie Levine’s photographs, we learn, “tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning.” Richard Prince “deploys an array of strategies … to undermine the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the generic mass-cultural image, revealing it to be a fiction of society’s desires.” Whereas Josephine Pryde “wickedly exposes photography’s role as the handmaiden to media mendacity,” Sarah Charlesworth’s appropriations of tabloid-derived images of men falling out of windows are “like tombstones [that] declare only the facts, but not the manner, of the death.”

And the writer is just getting started. There are about 20 texts to go, all of them in the same morbidly lugubrious vein. Yet the objects on view, by themselves, hardly seem of sufficient consequence, ambition, or temperament to carry the burden of this tragic sense of life. Rather, they tend to be slightly banal — not counting their intentionally Postmodern “banality” — in their need to take vaguely dyspeptic potshots at what they imagine to be received ideas of common humanity.

Only the second exhibition to be housed in the Met’s new gallery for contemporary photography, this show focuses on the conceptual wing of contemporary photography in all its self-righteous self-absorption. Like all areas of culture over the past three decades, this art has passed through a stage not of critical self-examination, as the curators and photographers themselves are pleased to imagine, but of inflated self-regard combined with an obssessive attention to the processes and rituals of the medium.

Fairly typical are the works of Mr. Prince and Ms. Levine, which are nothing less, and surely nothing more, than images of images. In his Postmodern assault on Modernist notions of originality, Mr. Prince re-photographs black-and-white advertisements in color. Ms. Levine “appropriates” and re-photographs the famous WPA images that Walker Evans made of one dust bowl family. Evans, however, especially in his WPA portraits of the Great Depression, was perhaps the sincerest man ever to take up a camera. He mission, as he saw it, was to frame the image and click the shutter, and thus to capture, with unimpeachable honesty, the retinal reality of human suffering. Indeed, the results are so powerful that, even in Ms. Levine’s sophomoric reproductions, one is still caught off guard by the excellence of the originals. That, of course, is not at all Ms. Levine’s point, but in a larger sense it is the message of the aggregate of works on view: the comparative, if not absolute, unimportance and emptiness of so much recent practice.

Not all the works, fortunately, are quite that feeble, and some of them are sufficiently accomplished that one wonders whether they have any reason to be in the show in the first place. Liz Deschenes’s “Green Screen #7” is exactly what its title suggests, a photograph of the sort of green screen used in creating special effects in the movies. But it is a striking transference to photography of the aesthetics that guided the likes of Malevich and Ad Reinhardt in their monochromatic paintings.

In a similar vein, Mark Wyse’s “Marks of Indifference #1 (Shelf)” depicts a wall from which a bookshelf has been abruptly detached. It combines poignancy with a formal interest that recalls both the more reticent forms of gestural abstraction and the photographs of Aaron Siskind.

One of the best images in the exhibition is a depiction of Fidel Castro by the dependably excellent Hiroshi Sugimoto. The punch line of this hushed and darkened portrait, with its fine register of details, is that it is really an image of a wax effigy from Madame Tussaud’s. In one sense, this plays into the theme of the show, but in another it transcends it: Rather than asserting some banally postmodern point about simulacrum, it manages to infuse even this effigy with a kind of human pathos. Its implicit assertion of the vanity of human events is an ancient one, but always relevant. And in this artifact, as in so many others through the ages, it is possible to find a deeper consolation.

That is not how the curators wish to see it. According to their reliably despairing wall text, Mr. Sugimoto’s photo is an “elegy for the medium itself and the era that produced it.” That seems highly unlikely. Their implication is that Mr. Sugimoto has lost faith in the original promise of photography, the promise, since Nicéphore Niépce first recorded a tangle of rooftops in Chalons-sur-Saône in 1826, that this art would be the supreme medium of truth. In the Castro portrait and in other images from his distinguished career, Mr. Sugimoto may have experimented with light and varying exposures, but his poignancy and power have always proceeded from a sense of direct contact and co-presence with what he records. In this commitment he is hardly alone among his contemporaries, even if the curators seem determined to believe otherwise.