There are places that give us a shiver without our knowing why. These aren’t always the grand vistas of oceans or mountain ranges. The shivery spots tend to be out of the way, secluded, and overlooked. They strike us with a sense of presence, at once alien and familiar. Historians of religion like to call this “the genius of place,” dressing it up in the Latin phrase “genius loci.” The German theologian Rudolf Otto coined the term “the numinous” to capture that spooky sensation. Certain spots, he argued, are inhabited by a “numen,” an indwelling divinity, whose presence we feel. The mystery arises because for all their strangeness, such places feel like places we have known before, if only in dream.

It might seem impossible to capture the genius of place in a photograph. But the great English photographer Edwin Smith (1912–1971) did so repeatedly. His black-and-white images are not only stunningly beautiful but seem suffused with the hidden spirits of the landscapes and the structures upon which he turned his lens. Now, in “Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith” (Merrell, 176 pages, $59.95), Robert Elwall, curator of photographs at the British Architectural Library, has provided a sumptuous survey of this remarkable artist’s work. Mr. Elwall accompanies the magnificent plates he has chosen with a detailed and perceptive account of the photographer’s career and working methods. Though famous and sought-after in his lifetime, Smith has been pretty much forgotten; his photographs appear unfashionable to an age which, as Mr. Elwall remarks, “values visceral shock over subtle resonance.”

Smith made his mark as an architectural photographer but his work was never purely documentary. His images display stubbornly eccentric angles of view. One of the most striking plates included here is a roofscape in Whitby, taken in 1959, in which a brick chimney, slightly off-center, stands like a sentinel against a smoky vista of roofs and gables and the softly gleaming river beyond. Smith’s uncanny feel for the surfaces of things, the rough overlapping slates and grimy bricks, gives a tactile elegance to the shot. Smith’s sense of place, as this and dozens of other images show, was far from mystical. If he sought out the “numinous” with his camera, it was something implicit in the very texture of things. He found it in an almost abstract image of a Venetian gondola rowlock, taken in 1961, which at first glance resembles a Brancusi sculpture but upon closer inspection is seen to be nothing but itself, a black and sinuous silhouette of pure form. Smith seemed to feel the contours of things with his eyes, of which his camera was a mere extension. “I have come to worship with my eyes,” he once remarked.

Like Eugène Atget, the Parisian photographer whose work he revered, Smith documented unpeopled places, a country church or a window display or the deep mazy alleyway alongside the “George and Vulture” pub in Bengal Court, London. But these vacant places have a thronged feeling, as though their denizens had just dodged back out of view. This saturated absence is most apparent in Smith’s wonderful shots of interiors, especially of workers’ cottages. Like Wright Morris, who could evoke the life of a family from an image of old nicked silverware — and whose work Smith’s resembles — Smith could make a kitchen in Sussex with its mantel clock, knick-knacks, and shining bottle of fresh milk seem like an annunciation.

Though Smith excelled at landscape and architectural photography, he had a whimsical eye for other subjects. Early in his career he haunted circuses and fairs, photographing clowns and acrobats. Hedocumented the lives of miners and colliers, and his portraits, unusually for the agitated 1930s, are full of grace and dignity. Smith saw himself, until late in his career, not as a photographer but as a painter. He called photography “co-operating with the inevitable.” It was merely a way to pay the bills.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, who also saw himself primarily as a painter, defined photography as seizing “the decisive moment.” This had the effect of compressing a dramatic instant in a single unforgettable sliver. Edwin Smith’s practice seems the opposite of this. In his work, the fractioned second expands and appears to spill beyond the borders of the print. The texture of light and darkness in a chosen space intrigued his eye more than the moment. He was a master of the decisive shadow.

eormsby@nysun.com