There is something prurient about wanting to see images of artists, especially artists in their studios. They tease us, offering a glimpse of someone’s routine, a glimpse that is meant to stand in for an entire life. They seduce us with the promise of access to the bared existence of these supposedly interesting people. And we look because, like tabloid magazine readers, we want to be manipulated — in this case into believing first that these pictures offer up the “truth” about a given artist and, second, that through them we can get to know who the artist “really” is.

Two current shows illustrate how those manipulations have changed in the past half century — how, that is, what we want from pictures of artists has evolved. And both amply demonstrate the voyeuristic appeal of looking through the studio keyhole.

Uptown, at Knoedler & Company, Dan Budnik’s suite of dyetransfer color photographs and accompanying black-and-white images look back to artists prominent in the 1950s and ’60s. Downtown, at Deitch Projects, Jason Schmidt has hung all 131 of the pictures of contemporary artists from his new book, “Artists,” published by Edition 7L/Steidl.

Mr. Budnik got to know many of the artists he photographed, and his silent companionship became part of his working method. As he explains in the lavish catalogue accompanying the show, his plan was “to spend time with someone, to just study everything about the person and take sequential photographs … make it all anecdotal so you could really tell a great deal about how a person lived and created art.”

What he aimed for was a kind of truth about the artist’s life, a higher form of snapshot. Often the artists aren’t posed at all, just captured at work. He shot Willem de Kooning painting in his Long Island studio from high up, so we can appreciate the calligraphic squalor of his workplace. Oil sketches, studies, and paintings are strewn across the vast floor, while de Kooning himself stands before a large canvas on a huge easel, a table of pigments and brushes near a tall window by his side.

In jacket and tie, holding a cigarette, Mark Rothko walks pensively through his studio. Clad in a space-age insulated suit to protect himself from the cold, Jasper Johns, on a stepladder, torques his body toward “Numbers.” He paints with a thumb, presumably to impart his famous “touch.”

When the artists do pose, they do so straightforwardly, with their artworks. Mr. Budnik imposes as little artifice as possible between them and us. These images all reinforce the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.

But in our media-savvy times, even the look of truth can seem staged, and so, by contrast, Mr. Schmidt cannily uses a staged look to comment on his subjects and their work. His setups, in which artist and photographer collaborate, owe something to Annie Leibovitz’s far more elaborate and sensationalizing pictures.

Although he does on occasion shoot in the plain style, as it were — Julie Mehretu seated on a milk crate in front of one of her massive canvases, for example — Mr. Schmidt usually engages in a kind of artifice that yields witty aperçus. Two prints are imperfectly joined to form one long street in Los Angeles, on which the artist Edward Ruscha is seen walking. The affixed prints are a lighthearted nod to Mr. Ruscha’s superlong images of streets in Los Angeles.

Next to the artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster stands one of their signature sculptures, which only disclose their ultimate forms when light hits them so as to cast shadows on a wall behind them — in this case it’s a seated couple, their backs to each other as though in a tiff. The shadow cast on the wall behind the artists shows them to be choking each other.

Unlike the uniformly somber characters in Mr. Budnik’s pictures — where the usual pose includes a cigarette in hand and a world-weary grimace — Mr. Schmidt’s contemporary artists don’t appear to take themselves too seriously. Wearing baggy army pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, Brad Kahlhamer hilariously poses a woman, as if to paint her, in front of a messy canvas in which the imagery looks to have been modeled on a pit-bull-ravaged Raggedy Ann doll. The conceptual artist Urs Fischer, corpulent and tattooed, sits outdoors blowing smoke onto a mirror. Next to him sits a skeleton, fogging up the mirror with its “breath.”

When he does resort to the standard artist-at-work portrait, Mr. Schmidt still manages to wrinkle its texture. One can barely pick out the photographer Andreas Gursky, high up in a crane above what seems to be Times Square, as he completes one of his studies of modern anonymity. With Banks Violette, Mr. Schmidt decided to parody the sort of studio portrait Mr. Budnik mastered a generation earlier. Here the artist, crouching on the black glass tabletop of one of his installations, looks up at us startled, as though he had no idea there was a photographer there. In his left hand he holds the butt-end of a totemic cigarette.

As to whether any photograph of an artist can tell us something about the way they actually live and work, one should remain skeptical. Even de Kooning faked painting for Mr. Budnik — and only told him so later. Of course, just because an actor is pretending doesn’t make him any less interesting to watch. The pictures in these two shows make for great theater.

Budnik until March 10 (19 E. 70th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-794-0550);

Schmidt until February 24 (76 Grand St., between Greene and Wooster streets, 212-343-7300).