Those who cannot afford the $20 admission fee at the Museum of Modern Art, take heart: The museum mounts small exhibitions in its through-block lobby, which is open to the public during museum hours. “New York at Night: Photographs From the Collection” comprises 27 photographs exhibited on the west wall of the south half of the lobby.

The viewing space is far from ideal. Only a couple of feet of floor accommodate the viewer between the benches that line the western side of the lobby and the wall bearing the photographs. People, usually talking on cell phones, occupy those benches all day long. The setup guarantees an unpleasantly cramped experience.

That said, “New York at Night” provides a good introduction to MoMA’s legendary photography collection. The New York focus is fitting, given how many great 20th-century photographers worked in New York. The nocturnal focus reminds us of how captivated photographers have been by that whole other city life that emerges when the sun goes down in New York. One image bears the title “New York at Night,” the classic 1930s aerial shot by Berenice Abbott showing Midtown skyscrapers, with their stepped silhouettes, glowing from their electric lights within, while the streets appear as rivers of fire. Though the picture comes from the middle of the Depression, it conveys, as perhaps no other image does, how before the 20th century the world had never known a place that consumed its night in such spectacular wattage as New York.

Many people think of the coruscating lights of Times Square when we think of New York at night. Two images of virtually the same scene, made close together in time by two 20th-century masters, show us the view north from Times Square. The first is by Andreas Feininger, dated c. 1946. (In most of the Feininger literature, though not in this exhibition, this and several other Feininger photographs of the same scene are identified as “Broadway looking south,” and dated 1940. In fact, it is a view north and is from the late 1940s.) The other is by Rudy Burckhardt. The wall text dates it as 1946–47, which is incorrect. It is 1949, judging from the movie titles visible on theater marquees. The Feininger is the sort of dense, foreshortened view at which he excelled, evoking E.B. White’s “Here Is New York” (1949): “The city is like poetry: It compresses all life … and adds … the accompaniment of internal engines.” The Burckhardt view, by contrast, opens up the scene, decompresses it, to show spectral beings in a sea of anomie.

The photographers sense anomie or alienation in the streets and nightclubs of the city. Bruce Davidson’s typically affecting image (untitled, 1959) of a pretty, pensive, and probably troubled girl, her left arm cradling her right as her hand touches her lip, filling the left half of the frame while obscure, frolicking teens occupy the right, trailing off to distant lights, is an almost perfect photograph. Most of the images take us inside. A Dan Weiner photo shows a wry-faced Harold Arlen in the foreground of a group including Marlene Dietrich, Leonard Lyons, and a young Truman Capote wearing sunglasses in El Morocco in 1955. Several of Garry Winogrand’s El Morocco photos are here, too, though none, to me, is as fun as the Weiner. In a different era, Larry Fink gives us a Studio 54 picture, from 1977. To the right are two people, their backs to us, possibly disco dancing or heading onto the dance floor. On the left is a man facing us, perhaps retreating from the dance floor. With his white dress shirt open to his navel, his rolled-up sleeves, his full mustache and square-jawed face, and downcast eyes, he is a picture of weary machismo, like a wounded soldier in a Delacroix painting — or one of the boxers Fink famously photographed. But he’s not a soldier, not even a boxer. He’s been beaten about by a nightlife he is sworn to conquer. And he stands for the ludicrous excesses of his time.

Switch then from him to the bigfinned car of 10 years earlier in Joel Meyerowitz’s hauntingly superb “Christmas, Kennedy Airport.” The composition is a marvel. The parked car sits in the lower right, a bare-branched tree spreads through the upper left. Beyond them, a row of trees neatly divides the plane horizontally in two. Beyond the trees rises a gaudily illuminated Christmas star in the upper right. Both the Fink and the Meyerowitz images convey an emptiness that all the nocturnal wattage of New York at night serves not to allay but to lay bare.

Other photographers include W. Eugene Smith, Tom Arndt, Diane Arbus, Weegee, Lee Friedlander, and William Klein. It’s a lovely selection. Would only there were more room in which to view it.

Until March 5 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).