One of the most felicitous miracles in God’s world is that artists find the instrument they need. Itzhak Perlman comes to the violin. Emily Dickinson tinkers with words. Mikhail Baryshnikov hurls his body into space. And Philip Trager gets to record buildings he sees on the ground glass of a large-format view camera. The John Stevenson Gallery has on display a retrospective of Mr. Trager’s work from the last 40 years, much of it taken with a view camera.

The small-format camera — 35 mm or the digital equivalent — is terrific for capturing fast moving action and doing it inconspicuously. It is virtually impossible to use a view camera unobtrusively. They are big, maybe 8 inches by 10 inches, with a bellows that can extend for two feet. Because they are heavy, they have to be supported on a tripod. To see the ground glass properly, the photographer uses a black cloth that drapes from the rear of the camera to his waist. But they are ideal for certain types of photography, and one of them — architectural photography — was Mr. Trager’s first enthusiasm. (He went on to become an important photographer of modern dance, but for that he used a handheld camera.)

The view camera, because it is fixed on its tripod, allows meticulous framing. The photographer decides with great precision exactly what he wants in his picture, and what he wants to exclude. It favors photographers with a strong sense of composition, Mr. Trager’s great strength. The image the photographer sees on the ground glass is upside down and reversed, which gives him a sense of its abstract qualities. (Representational painters will look at a canvas upside down for the same purpose.) The bellows can be adjusted to eliminate parallax, the illusion that the sides of a building are converging. And the large negative size captures an enormous amount of detail. Mr. Trager used all these traits to great effect in his 1977 book “Photographs of Architecture.” Six blackand-white vintage prints from it are at Stevenson.

Mr. Trager was born in Connecticut in 1935, went to Wesleyan University, and was practicing law in Connecticut, but dreaming of taking pictures. He started taking photographic excursions close to home, driving around the state and shooting buildings that interested him. The tightly framed, white clapboard house in “Essex” (1976) looks like it dates from the Colonial or Federalist period, but the scrollwork on the porch on “New London” (1975) makes it Victorian. The wooden bas-relief columns and ornate pediment that decorate the door in “Wethersfield” (1974) are signs of wealth, but the modest house in “Winchester Center” (1975) is distinguished by its simplicity.

Mr. Trager’s impulses are not those of a documentarian, or even properly those of an architectural photographer, but of an art photographer. He uses his view camera to make a handsome picture that happens to have this or that house as its subject. His indebtedness to the Walker Evans of “American Photographs” is clear, but so is his difference. The simple two-story wood framed house in “Glastonbury” (1976) is shot head-on, as Evans might have taken it, but from farther away, to give a sense of its placement in a treerimmed field. It is winter and the two large trees on either side of the path leading to the front door are bare of leaves. Mr. Trager shot with the sun low so that the trees cast dramatic shadows on the front of the house and on the lawn, upsetting its symmetry. There is a calculated beauty in the image that careful manipulation of his view camera made possible.

“Philip Trager: New York” was published three years later. Eleven pictures at Stevenson are from this project, and here the resident spirit is Berenice Abbott, and Abbott’s great Parisian cicerone, Eugène Atget. As in Connecticut, Mr. Trager did not choose buildings for their architectural qualities as much as for their photographic possibilities. The influences he absorbed were pushed to meet his own ends. “Times Square” (1977) is an assemblage of right angles, of intersecting lines and planes, of buildings and signs. In the middle is a billboard with a large portrait of Rod Stewart, but the picture was apparently painted or plastered on metal sheets that had warped. The large negative picks up the seams between the sheets of metal and the irregularities of their surfaces, so the rock star’s face is bumpy, fissured, and absurd.

“Pulitzer Fountain, Grand Army Plaza” (1978) contrasts the nymph-like statue atop the fountain with Edward Durell Stone’s banal General Motors building across Fifth Avenue. Only a view camera could render the tedious vertical lines so absolutely parallel. Conversely, in “13-15 West 122nd Street” (1979) it is the sinuous curve of a balustrade up the steps of a Harlem brownstone that Mr. Trager positioned precisely on the ground glass so its wiggle animates the entire picture. Almost every image incorporates a fresh photographic idea; familiar buildings — and the whole urban visual encounter — are experienced as on one’s first walk through the city.

Moving further from his native Connecticut, Mr. Trager took his ponderous view camera to the north of Italy to take the photographs for “The Villas of Palladio” (1986). The six images from this book at Stevenson show how versatile an instrument it is. The bottom two thirds of “Villa Almerico Capra, La Rotonda” (1984) are occupied with a field of wild flowers that slopes up to the villa. A few trees are silhouetted at the top of the hill, and the villa, with its classical columns and identifying dome, are on the right. The depth of field the camera is capable of means details of individual flowers, branches on the trees, and ornaments on the building are seen with great clarity. As always with Mr. Trager, every element of the picture seems to be just where it should.

The picture from the basement of “Villa Pojana” is very different, an interior of austere elegance, unornamented surfaces, massive geometric shapes. The camera captures the texture of the utilitarian materials, and the play of light in an empty recess. Again one can imagine Mr. Trager fiddling under his black cloth, shifting the camera minute degrees until everything is in its place and he captures the room and the quietness it contains.

Until January 13 (338 W. 23rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-352-0070).