Cities attract photographers like courtesans attract lovers.Paris and New York have probably inspired the largest number of suitors – each smitten shutterbug expressing his passion with the click of his camera – but other cities have their swains. Currently, the Candace Dwan and Nailya Alexander Galleries have combined forces in an inaugural joint exhibition, “Northern Light,” that features work by two photographers devoted to two cities situated at about 60 degrees north latitude. (New York is 40 degrees 29 minutes north latitude.) Alexey Titarenko’s “St. Petersburg Series” and Pentti Sammallahti’s “Helsinki” are both ardent in their grappling with the objects of their attention, but – to conclude this analogy before it becomes obscene – as different as two disparate beaux wooing two disparate maids.

Helsinki is the starred capital at the southern tip of the map of Finland. It has little reality to me beyond that, so Mr. Sammallahti’s pictures are a revelation. Another picture of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building would be compared to prior photos of those monuments, but Helsinki for me is only as Mr. Sammallahti presents it. Not surprisingly,it is cold,with ice and snow an important part of many of the images. The buildings are austere, classical, and precise and made of brick or granite.There are few people about, solitary dogs, and isolated birds. The people who are there seem weathered.There is a crystalline charm.

Mr. Sammallahti (b. 1950) is a miniaturist or, at least, he has chosen to print his black-and-white negatives in a relatively small size, mostly about 4 inches by 5 inches. The pleasure of successful large prints like the ones I saw last week that were 96 inches across is that you stand back and view them like a landscape, craning your head from left to right and back again. The pleasure of small prints is that they draw you in: You stand there with your nose not far from the wall and your eyeballs carefully picking out the details. Mr. Sammallahti’s pictures reward such careful scrutiny: They can be comprehended at a glance, but not exhausted without extended viewing. All of the 21 pictures are titled “Helsinki,” and have dates from 1964 to 2005, evidence of Mr. Sammallahti’s long-term commitment to this project. The compositions are simple, but the subject matter is quite varied.

A picture from 1973 is of two birds on an ice floe in the harbor.The two birds, maybe ducks, are black silhouettes against a small ice floe, maybe 10 feet across, floating in the lower right-hand corner next to a larger ice floe, maybe 30 feet across. The ice seems to hover over the dark water, perhaps because of the way it has melted underneath. Beyond the open water in the lower half of the picture there is a band of ice, then a cluster of ships – freighters and masted fishing boats – dimly visible through the mist, some harbor side buildings, and the city as it merges into the gray sky. There is a chill poetry to this image, still, quiet, and romantically mournful.

A very different picture is one from 1991, of a pagan ceremony. Our cultural biases tend to associate the primitive with southern climes, but the north has its old gods and spirits, and the rituals necessary to hold sway over them. Here a barefoot figure in tights and a cloth mask with big eye openings crouches menacingly in front of an enormous bonfire.The fire is consuming branches and planks, but also contemporary wooden doors that seem anachronistic. On the other side of the fire is a circle of onlookers, probably tourists come to watch a folk event. Although the rite is clearly a staged presentation, Mr. Sammallahti’s elevated point of view and dark printing imbue it with a sense of archaic theurgy.

There’s a picture from 1968 of two Gypsy girls mugging for the camera in an open area next to a river or lake. In the background is a small metal caravan attached to a Studebaker Sky Hawk. The weak northern sun barely penetrates the gloomy overcast. Who knew there were Gypsies in Finland, to say nothing of a stylish Studebaker Sky Hawk? From 1996 there is a picture of bare trees in winter elegantly silhouetted against the snow with three disconsolate birds to one side. From 2000 a picture of the harbor with 20 seabirds, each floating on its own slab of ice, with warehouses and a larger building, possibly a church, disappearing into the mist behind.A picture from 1979 is of a lone Volkswagen Beetle parked in front of a deserted block of five- and six-story commercial buildings with a single dog patrolling the street. From 1964, a boy is perched in the second-story window of a building of moldering brick.

Pentti Sammallahti’s pictures are exquisite the way fine etchings are. Many are subtly toned, which enhances their delicate beauty.

Alexey Titarenko was born in 1962, when St. Petersburg was still known as Leningrad. His black-and-white pictures from 1992 through 1999 show the city as Russian society was moving from the wreckage of communism into its still unresolved future. If Mr. Sammallahti’s Helsinki exists in a placid timelessness, Mr.Titarenko’s St. Petersburg is beset with fretful anxiety.There is a sense of trauma.

Mr. Titarenko frequently uses a very long exposure so that buildings, trees, and other inanimate objects are sharp, but people are blurred. The citizens of his St. Petersburg are wraithlike figures,partially transparent,anonymous, in motion but headed toward dissolution. “Untitled (Stranger)” (1996) shows a solitary pedestrian on a snowy sidewalk on a street of buildings that look as if they house parts of the bureaucracy.The street and buildings are light gray, the pedestrian’s back a darker gray, but his legs and head and outline are too indistinct to have much reality. He is a being with movement, but without identity.

Mr. Titarenko’s untitled crowd photos use the same technique with large masses of people. In “Untitled (Crowd 4),” a blurred group ascends a long flight of steps outside a building. The only body parts that can be made out are the hands planted on the railing: The rest is just a melded sea of humanity, as characterless as a flock of sheep. The queue was one of the Soviet Union’s primary forms of social organization, and Mr.Titarenko memorializes it in these scarring images.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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