When I think of English landscapes, it is John Constable who comes first to mind: picturesque rural scenes with lush green fields and trees, purling streams, plump livestock, billowing clouds sailing majestically across deep blue skies, and the hand of man represented by a cozy thatched cottage or an exquisite cathedral sunlit in the distance. A few farmers keep the whole thing going. Among photographic landscapes, I think of the black-and-white pictures Bill Brandt took of historical sites, full of atmosphere and the memory of pagan rituals that celebrated nature. The color photographs by Englishman Stephen Hughes, currently on display at the Robert Mann gallery, are nothing like either of them.

Consider the family that fills the middle of “Beachy Head, England” (1996): mother, father, and three children. The five are seen from behind. The mother has short, cropped, curly blond hair and wears a dark jumper over a white, short-sleeved T-shirt; the father is athletic in his white T-shirt, bright-red running shorts, and sneakers; of the youngest child, we see mostly his light blond hair. Another boy wears a white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. The blond boy on the right wears a bright red jumpsuit with the Ferrari logo, a black stallion rampant on a yellow shield, on its back. The family seems middle-class, apparently normal, and – since they are all holding hands – bound by affection.

But they are holding hands as they stand a short step away from the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea; there is no guardrail. A bright sun is in front of them, and since Mr. Hughes has set his exposure to render the colors of their clothes correctly, the rest of the scene is overexposed – that is, color has been drained out of it. The pale, blue sea before them bleeds into a hazy, blank sky, the rocky cliff is chalky. The five stand out against the faded grandeur of the scene, their tightly held hands their only protection against the concrete danger at the edge of the cliff and the existential uncertainty represented by the blurred horizon. In our minds we call out to them. “Be careful!”

Mr. Hughes’s landscapes, from England and elsewhere, frequently make us anxious. In many a single tiny figure is set in a vast landscape that further diminishes him. One black-clad man stands, doing nothing in particular, at the far end of a muddy soccer field that takes up the bottom half of “Oviedo, Spain” (2000). The flat field is surrounded by a high, wire fence, through which we see a landscape of fields, red tiled buildings, bridges – evidence of industrial activity – and distant mountains overhung by lowering rain clouds.

In “Aberdeen, USA” (2003), a man with a portable electric lawn-trimmer stands towards the back of a grassy field much too big to be mowed with his little machine. The field is surrounded by typical American wood-frame houses, most attended by station wagons, vans, or SUVs. In the middle “Sunderland, England” (1998), a boy in a red jacket and white pants lies prone on the flat, glass roof of a museum. A few modernist architectural features with no clear functions are scattered on the roof, and beyond it we see a cityscape of contemporary England, new but characterless. All color has been washed from the sky. The psychic distance between Constable’s Hampstead Heath and Mr. Hughes’s roof in Sunderland is greater than the geographical.

Another of Mr. Hughes’s lone individuals is the young girl seen towards the rear of “Palma Airport, Majorca, Spain” (1998), pushing an empty luggage carrier through a huge, antiseptic space typical of these impersonal terminals. There is almost no color. Where is the luggage? Where are her parents? Where is everyone else? Is this an appropriate environment in which a child should be left to amuse herself? In “Bari I, Italy” (2003), there are no people at all, not even a child, although it is a picture of a playground. A few neatly arranged pieces of metal playground equipment – a hobbyhorse on a spring – sit at the corner of two blank concrete walls; the ground is a colorless tile and the only vestiges of nature are some pathetic shrubs along one of the walls and a few wisps of cloud in the sky. A child would rather play in the mud than have to spend time here.

Stephen Hughes’s concerns are similar to those of Robert Adams and the New Topographers, photographers who have explored the way man tenants space. It is characteristic of their work that they are sophisticated, that they don’t concentrate on slag heaps or areas where a total disregard for the consequences has led to wholesale destruction of the environment. Rather, they takes as their subjects marginal sites where an effort has been made. The inhabited landscapes they present are not awful, merely inadequate, where some thing needful has been forgotten. What lacks is not so much aesthetic, or even an appreciation of nature per se: It is a more profound understanding of the humans who pass through – something the architects of Stonehenge knew intuitively their clients had to have.

The pictures in this exhibit are not didactic. Some have wry elements, like the solitary swan paddling by the little beach in “Far Rockaway, USA” (2004), almost lost in the stretch of beach houses and high-rises. Some, like “Beachy Head, England,” are engagingly ambiguous. The half-dozen or so diminutive surfers in black wetsuits strung along the vast expanse of ocean at “St. David’s, Wales” (1998), don’t seem bent on damage, but merely decorative. The delicate, pale blue of the dense clouds overhead is reflected on the surface of the water – very pretty. But what do we learn except that the earth is huge and man’s efforts to master it achingly puny?

Until March 5 (210 Eleventh Avenue, between 24th and 25th Streets, 212-989-7600). Prices: $1,600-$3,600.