The ennui of the 1970s is palpable in Adam Bartos’s low-key color photographs of Los Angeles. Mr. Bartos, a New Yorker, lived in that city for six months near the end of the decade. He recorded ordinary, unpeopled scenes in his local neighborhood of Ocean Park using a large-format camera. In a recent interview, Mr. Bartos recalled the experience as “an emotional zero point.” The 5-inch-by-7-inch negatives, shot almost 30 years ago, were recently made into C-prints measuring 34 inches by 45 inches.

Mr. Bartos tempered the depressing sight of cheap beachside suburbia by shooting under muted natural light conditions. Even where there is nothing much to see, the view camera’s fantastic detail can attune the spectator to what was present before its lens. “Ocean Drive, Manhattan Beach” (1979) depicts a dead-end street on an overcast day, the sea curling sleepily beyond it. In “Los Angeles (Blue Mustang)” from 1978, the scenic view overlooking Los Angeles at twilight is compositionally anchored by a sky blue car parked on the bluff.

In other works, Mr. Bartos’s studies of kitchen interiors take a similarly exacting approach to banal subject matter. The frontal composition of “Pico Boulevard (Bravo Poster), Santa Monica” (1978) features a tidy kitchen. The yellow tone of two wooden chairs placed against a white wall is complemented by blue shadows cast upon the floor. Although cropped by the top edge of the picture, a poster from an exhibition by the acclaimed documentary photographer Manuel Bravo is a prominent part of the image. Perhaps the young Mr. Bartos was thinking about how to enter the conversation of photography — particularly in color.

Indeed, the retrospective printing of Mr. Bartos’s Los Angeles portfolio attests to the fact that, during the 1970s, color photography was still a nascent high-end art form. Pioneering efforts to explore its potential during the 1960s by such eminent talents as Eliot Porter and Edward Weston were not widely regarded as successful. Photographic color dyes in this era bore the taint of amateurism associated with Kodak snapshots, and their archival quality was a technical problem. Mr. Bartos’s soft color palette might have reflected a certain caution toward the use of color.

The current exhibition of Bartos’s L.A. series comes soon after the 2005 publication of his book “Boulevard” (Steidldangin, 120 pages, $65). The book encompasses Mr. Bartos’s scenes of L.A. in the 1970s as well as images he made of Paris during the early 1980s.

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The Swedish artist Anders Krisár displays recent photographs as well as figurative sculpture in his spare installation titled “Janus.” At first glance, the subject of the photographs “Janus (1)” (2006), “Janus (2)” (2006), and “Janus (3)” (2006) on display in the main gallery appears to be empty domestic rooms. But ghostly traces of naked figures (including the artist’s) who moved in front of the lens during long exposures can also be discerned. A face just barely registers above a swirling field of flesh in “Mist Mother” (2006). These large C-prints, measuring 55 1/2 inches by 70 7/8 inches, are all mounted on aluminum.

Nearby the photographs, the wall-mounted sculptures “Cuirass (Front)” and “Cuirass (Back)” (both 2005) depict two torsos. Their technical perfection makes clear that the flesh textures were taken from two different models. (One was that of the artist, the other that of his brother.) The gallery also features a hyper-real sculpture of a young boy seated on a chair, “I’m Here Somewhere” (2006). He is life-size and dressed in contemporary clothes. A little slumped and wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he might be sulking. The vacant holes of his eye sockets create a goblin-like effect.

Mr. Krisár presents two other sculptures in a separate room within the gallery, spaciously installed. “Untitled (Bronze/Wax)” (2006) is a corner-mounted work consisting of a bronze cast of the artist’s mother’s face placed close to a white wax cast of his own. The bronze is heated electrically, causing the wax to melt slowly. Emerging from an opposite wall, the cast of a child’s arm looks almost too much like the real thing; epoxy resin and paint mimic the delicate freshness of young skin to an alarming degree. Moving about the fleshy fragments and images of “Janus,” the viewer may experience a heightened sense of her own figure, complete and intact.

Bartos until January 20 (525 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-414-0370);

Krisár until January 27 (528 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-315-0470).