My favorite work by Thomas Demand (b.1964) is a huge color photograph – more than 6 feet high and 16 feet long – called “Clearing” (2003). It depicts a swathe of forest: slanting rays of sunlight reflect a panoply of leafy hues in the forest curtain, from the palest, through the brightest, and on to the darkest of greens; in spots, one glimpses an autumnal yellow. Mr. Demand, however, didn’t just take the photograph, he also created the forest – 270,000 individual leaves cut from green paper.

Here is what Mr. Demand, a German artist, does. He chooses an image, often though not always one plucked from the usual sources – books, magazines, and so on. Then, with great care and craft, he builds a life-size model of the scene in the image, using colored paper and cardboard. Finally, before destroying his model, he photographs it in color with a large-format camera. The resulting photographs are laminated and displayed behind Plexiglass, unframed.

“Clearing” comes from an image of Venice’s Giardini, and it is one of 25 such photographs, and one short film, on view in MoMA’s exhibition “Thomas Demand,” the first museum survey of Mr. Demand’s work in the United States.

The artist’s upbringing was, it would seem, perfectly geared to the sort of art he pursues. The son of two painters and grandson of an architect, Mr. Demand studied interior design in Munich and, later, sculpture at Dusseldorf’s famous Kunstacademie. In paper, Mr. Demand does shiny glasses and reflective liquids; he can mimic the effects of light and the softness of pillows with convincing verisimilitude. Yet, like paintings, the photographs do not suppress their constructed origins. They are not seamless copies of reality. Rather, Mr. Demand always leaves clues to how they were made: a pencil mark, a blank electrical plug, a wrinkle in the paper.

What he leaves out are people. Indeed, the closest he comes in this show are the framed “photographs” of people arrayed on the lacquer black top of a “Grand Piano” (1993). Stylized outlines, literally without faces, the individuals in the frames look charmingly like Alex Katz paintings. Still, the absence of people in Mr. Demand’s photos gives them a cool, or distanced, quality. They are eerie, though cheerful – the colored paper inevitably calling to mind childhood crafts projects.

An artist who proceeds from an intricate conceptual structure, Mr. Demand nevertheless arrives at images that require little knowledge of their conceptual underpinnings. At MoMA, only their titles accompany the images, although one senses that their eeriness must, in part, stem from the fact that many of them allude to historical events.

One of the earliest, “Room” (1994), shows an office with a crumbling ceiling and dislocated window frames housing the blasted debris of furniture and cabinetry. It was based on a photograph of Adolf Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters after it was bombed in 1944. “Barn” (1997), an almost abstract black wall scored with white lines to indicate light filtering through slats, and punctuated by two windows, comes from Hans Namuth photographs of the painter Jackson Pollock’s studio in Springs, Long Island.

Given his subject matter and methods, it seems natural that a number of Mr. Demand’s works address architecture and the way built spaces affect their intended inhabitants. Derived from an example in the neo-Bauhaus building of his art school, “Staircase” (1995) focuses on empty, institutional walls and the sharp edges of the landings and stairs. Making the piece, Mr. Demand was interested in “the assumption that you can raise better people with a better architecture, a central but questionable ideal of modernism.” Assumptions about design also play a crucial, if unstated, role in “Gate” (2004), which reproduces the X-ray terminal at Logan Airport, through which Mohammed Atta passed in September 2001.

Not all the photographs derive from specific images. “Diving Board” (1994), in which, seen from a low angle, a short springboard stands between stadium bleachers on one side and a multi-platform diving tower on the other, alludes to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Olympia” without referring to a specific image. Four microphones hanging amidst the golden, check patterns of sound-dampening panels in “Laboratory” (2000) represent BMW’s anechoic chamber, a room engineered to test the sound levels of cars.

When not engaging historical or politically charged spaces, Mr. Demand tends to explore the abstract motifs that define and decorate space. In “Panel” (1996), the grid of dark holes in a white peg-board appears like a Minimalist painting, while the wavy lines of grass blades patterning “Lawn” (1998) could easily be mistaken for those in a photograph of real grass.

But even the most abstract works, like “Barn” and “Laboratory,” employ a relentless mise-en-scene, a cinematic perspective, which the artist took to its logical conclusion six years ago, when he made his first film. By setting his scenes in motion, as he does in “Trick” (2004), a 1-minute loop (and the only film running in the show), Mr. Demand emphasizes the humorous aspect of his work. A bowl and two plates spin on a rectangular table, as in a cartoon. More emotionally complex, the still images never quite allow for slapstick. And it is their seriousness – the unannounced historical allusions, the haunted atmosphere of empty rooms – combined with the childlike insouciance of bright colors and construction paper that infuse these works with such power.

Knowing Mr. Demand’s tricks doesn’t diffuse the impact of his work at all. If his photographs present an uninhabited past, devoid of people, his current show deserves throngs.

Until May 30 (11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).