The history of photography is as much the history of technology as of sensibility. In the 19th century, photographic plates were not fast enough to stop motion, so subjects were either inanimate or rigidly posed. The first streetscape we have, an image made in 1839 by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre of a boulevard in Paris, seems deserted; pedestrians are blurred out, with the exception of a man standing still to have his shoes shined and the man doing the shining. By contrast, contemporary photographic technology, such as that used by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao for his “Habitat 7” exhibition, lets the artist put pedestrians into his streetscape or take them out as he chooses.

Mr. Liao was born in Taiwan in 1972, moved to Canada for high school, and last May completed an MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The culture he comes from has an ancient visual heritage, and he has learned 21st-century techniques that let him adopt it for his present purposes. “Habitat 7” is a study of the route of the MTA’s no. 7 line, the subway that starts underground in Times Square and travels aboveground across northwest Queens to Main Street in Flushing. Mr. Liao rode the no. 7 train for many years as he pursued his MFA, and became fascinated with the changing perspectives of the city it afforded, as well as the incredibly heterogeneous populations that live and work beneath its elevated structure.

Streetscapes of Manhattan can use the island’s grid system as an organizing principle, and the street walls of the high-rise buildings as a natural framing device, but the topography of the outer boroughs is mostly inchoate. Figuring out where to plunk your tripod down and where to point your camera are the photographer’s first challenges. For “LIRR, Hunters Point” (2004) – which, like all eight pictures in the exhibition, is a pigment ink print – Mr. Liao chose the railing of an overpass above the railroad station in this industrial section of Queens, so the railing and its appurtenances bisect the image.

The left side of this 40-inch-by-96-inch picture is the sidewalk and the roadbed of the overpass. It is late afternoon; the sun is declining below the horizon; there are dramatic backlit clouds in the sky and long shadows on the ground; and the man nearest us on the sidewalk is headed away.All of this contributes to the elegiac feeling of the picture.

Pedestrians farther away cross the road in a random pattern of jaywalking, and the single line of traffic to the far left forms a funereal procession. A steel expansion joint with the sun glinting off of it draws a prominent oblique line across the sidewalk and street that is probably more important in the photograph than it would have seemed to an observer at the time. Three signs on a six-story building that looms up at the end of the overpass are ominously blank: two on the side of the building because of sun glare, and a billboard on the roof because it is turned away from the sun.

To the right of the railing we see down to the railroad tracks; the insubstantial structure of the station; a few scattered passengers waiting on the platform; and in the distance some industrial and commercial buildings. One notable feature is that the lateafternoon sun has turned the wild grass and weeds that grow along the tracks into a blaze of unnatural yellow-orange. In the far distance, the horizon is the clearly defined Manhattan skyline, with the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the U.N. Secretariat Building helping to orient viewers unfamiliar with the outer boroughs.

It takes four paragraphs to describe “LIRR, Hunters Point” because it is visually complex, emotionally fine, and technologically sophisticated. In fact, the picture would be impossible without Mr. Liao’s command of the physical aspects of the medium because the scene shown never existed, at least not as it is represented.

When Mr. Liao sets about to make a picture, he places his 8-inch-by-10-inch view camera at a given point, and over a period of several hours takes many negatives with the lens pointed at slightly different angles.The large negatives record small details,and the multiple exposures let him focus at different depths of the view. The negatives are then digitalized and amalgamated using Photoshop, a computer program as important to most of today’s photographers as digital-recording equipment is to musicians.

Photoshop lets Mr. Liao “paste” several negatives seamlessly together to form a wider panorama than would otherwise be possible. It lets him take out incidents – say an awkward pedestrian – and leave just the background, or insert a different object from another negative. The degree of sharpness can be tweaked, as can the perspective and the contrast. And colors can be radically altered.

I recently took a course in Photoshop technique at the International Center of Photography, and was a bit unnerved to learn that images can be manipulated down to the level of an individual pixel. This gives the photographer something of the control a painter has over his pictures. For instance, the particular intensity of the unnatural yellow-orange grass was probably Mr. Liao’s decision.

It has always been possible for a photographer to create a montage, to physically cut and paste fictitious prints, but not with the ease and sophistication Photoshop offers. This has philosophical implications I am not competent to discuss – not yet anyway – but for the time being I admire Mr. Liao’s command of the technology and the artistic purposes to which he puts it.

The streets of the outer boroughs, including the sections of Queens served by the no. 7 train, go on and on in haphazard disorder. Mr. Liao is developing a style that can make this randomness visually coherent. The pictures extend horizontally like classic Asian scrolls, and incorporate the gaudy colors of Chinese gewgaws. In “Roosevelt Avenue” (2005), “5 Points, Long Island City,” (2005), and “69th Street, Woodside” (2004), Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao is able to express his feelings for this adopted place and its enterprising people.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until March 25 (535 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-627-2410). From March 12 until July 9 at the Queens Museum of Art (New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, 718-598-9700).