The Nazi death camps are tourist attractions. Pictures of them fill shelf-loads of books by distinguished photographers. They are routinely reconstructed as sets for plays and multimillion-dollar movie productions. As a consequence, people know what they look like and can recognize them. Those determined to preserve the memory of the Holocaust end up making the sites of the killing familiar: It happened in a place you can know, you do know.

What is the appropriate way to photograph the site of evil? I was a bit unnerved a few years ago to see an exhibition of Gary Beeber’s cheery Cibachromes of Dachau; the red brick chimney was just a vivid geometrical shape against a clear blue sky. On the other hand, Michael Kenna imbued the black-and-white pictures of concentration camps in his book “Impossible to Forget” with a hovering sense of menace that made clear they were images of places where terrible things had happened. But the overcast skies and foreboding shadows smack more of stagey melodrama than of full-bore tragedy. Still, each approached his work with the expectation that people want to see these things.

Anna Shteynshleyger photographs atrocity sites that no one will recognize. The Soviet gulags are the locus of a great forgetting, a black hole in Russian consciousness, and rarely subject to Western curiosity. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, first with “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and then with “The Gulag Archipelago”; Varlam Shalamov with his spare “Kolyma Tales”; and recently Anne Applebaum in “Gulag: A History” made the existence of this chain of prison labor camps concentrated in Siberia irrefutable, but how many agitate on behalf of its victims? There are few memorials, few markers, few museums, few tourists. Out of sight, out of mind. But Ms. Shteynshleyger wants to show us.

The work on display at the Moti Hasson Gallery grew out of three trips Ms. Shteynshleyger made to Russia in 2001 and 2002. These are large digital Cprints, some as big as 48 by 61 inches. At first glance most of them seem to be scenic pictures of empty wilderness, roughly comparable to sections of the Adirondacks except for a certain overall bleakness. There is an advantage to the large scale here: It opens up details that would be lost in a smaller format. For instance, there is something not right about the lake in “Landscape” (2002). The camera looks down from a height on the lake that is in the foreground of the picture; beyond it is a verdant valley and a distant ridge of low mountains. The dull sky, almost white, is reflected in the lake. But look carefully at the scraggly pines on the near side of the lake: They come up out of the water, which means they were there before the lake was, which means the lake is man-made.

In the middle of the lake is a little island, with the barely discernable remains of a road running across it: Before the lake was formed, the road must have gone somewhere. On the far side of the lake, there is evidence of excavations of some sort, random scrapings, disturbances in the natural rhythm of the topography. But there is no apparent reason for whatever work was done here, no hydroelectric plant or irrigation project, and whatever it was intended to be has been abandoned. In many instances the gulag existed not to build or accomplish anything, but primarily to work its laborers to death. This bruised landscape is their memorial. Ms. Shteynshleyger has no way of knowing who they were or where they are buried, but her picture makes us contemplate the routine savagery that destroyed them.

“Steps” (2001), is a diptych, each panel 48 by 60 inches, of concrete steps running continuously across the two panels. The concrete is white and somewhat mottled, and each step is edged with a piece of angle iron painted red, probably with a rust inhibitor. It might even be pretty, except that these steps border the Moscow-Volga Canal, built with labor from a camp that sometimes held as many as 193,000 inmates. The steps serve no purpose. I imagine that the prisoners who built them would not bother being fastidious, and so the red paint on the angle iron was slopped on and dripped: Irregular red rivulets run down the front of the steps and immediately suggest blood. There are occasional cigarette butts and little heaps of broken brown glass, the remains from recent visitors who stopped for a smoke and a bottle of beer. Again Ms. Shteynshleyger provides a text that we must read against a learned history.

“Perm Grasses” (2001) was taken in a region where, by the 1950s, there were 170 camps, with a population of 112,238. The land is flat with occasional skinny brown plants a few feet tall. It stretches away to a pale, tan line on the horizon that may be the embankment of a road or a railroad track, with some purplish hills beyond. The sky is low, mostly white, and sits heavily on the landscape. Rather than freedom, the open space seems confining, too vast to escape. “Kommunarka Trees” (2001) is a strand whose trees’ branches start so close to the ground they seem to form an impenetrable wall, green with a yellowish cast, as if they are hiding something. During the Great Terror, Kommunarka was the site of mass shootings; no one knows how many.

Margaret Bourke-White was one of the first photojournalists to reach the liberated German concentration camps as World War II was ending. She photographed the emaciated prisoners in their stripped rags pressing against the barbed wire fence, an image that is impossible to forget. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz has been photographed so often as to become the corporate logo of evil. Anna Shteynshleyger has set herself a difficult task, to build a visual record that will memorialize the Soviet dead. Her pictures are elusive, more like music than data, but the history she is dealing with is so difficult to comprehend there may be no other way.

Until June 16 (330 W. 38th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-268-4444).