Seeing the “Stephen Shore: American Surfaces” exhibition at P.S.1 made me appreciate what a wonderful photographer William Eggleston is. The wall text at the entrance to the exhibition yokes Messrs. Shore and Eggleston as “central figures in 1970s color photography,” but if that is so, it is quickly apparent that Mr. Eggleston is the more central.

Stephen Shore (b. 1947) is a conscientious photographer who typically uses a very large-format view camera and shows contact prints of his pictures. For this body of work he used a 35mm camera (much easier to travel with), but framed his images with the precision of someone in the habit of using the more cumbersome view camera, and kept the enlargements small so that details would be reproduced with a minimum loss of clarity.

The arrangement of the prints – there are 300 of them – on the walls is indicative of Mr. Shore’s weaknesses. The 5-inch-by-7-inch C-prints are mounted in 18 1/4-inch-by-15 3/4-inch mats and displayed in plain white frames that are ganged three deep about an inch apart along the walls. Since they aren’t labeled, we do not know exactly where or when the pictures were taken, though we do know that Mr. Shore traveled around the United States between 1972 and 1973. It is okay for us not to be told that we are looking at this particular city or town or at that particular city or town, but it puts a burden on the images to be intrinsically so interesting that the where of them becomes irrelevant. That happens, but only occasionally: Mostly the untitled pictures just run into one another.

As he traveled, Mr. Shore programmatically shot the same subjects in many locations: gas stations, restaurant place settings (sometimes before the food arrived, sometimes showing the eats, sometimes the bones and empty cups after a meal), bathroom fixtures, open refrigerators (some empty, some full), eccentric buildings, beauty shops, signs, intersections, motel-room television sets, and people encountered on the way. There is a sense of belatedness – of having-been-doneness – about much of this material.

Take the pictures of the bathrooms. Urinals and toilets may be interesting, but we have seen enough of them represented that they are not interesting just by virtue of being photographed. There is a yeoman, perfunctory quality to these images. They are in focus, the colors are plausible, the formal qualities have been attended to, but they are intentionally nothing special. Mr. Shore is known for this affectless, “postcard” style, but it seems to me a photographer has an obligation to the viewer to provide more than mere data. The portraits included in the show tend to be the most interesting pictures, perhaps because faces are usually more interesting than toilets. At least I hope I never see one that isn’t.

Many of the adjectives used to describe Mr. Shore’s photographs would also apply to William Eggleston’s work, but Mr. Eggleston can make the mundane numinous; there is a quality to his works that brings you up short and makes you look again. The pictures in “Stephen Shore: American Surfaces” let the viewer glide effortlessly along, taking them in three at a time, all at one go.

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Being unhappy is no excuse for art. Not even being very unhappy. Art is a cruel discipline that makes no concession to its practitioners for working under a handicap. The eponymous exhibition of 70 black and white photographs by Peter Hujar, also at P.S.1, reflects the tension of an artist living and dying with AIDS, but the gravitas one would naturally expect too often shades from the somber into the merely dreary. This is a disappointment, since Hujar (1934-87) was a man of talent.

That talent shines through in some of the pictures at P.S.1. “Shrine at San Gennaro” (1976) shows a gilded bust of the saint displayed at Little Italy’s annual street fair. It is night, and the bust is surrounded by tinsel and ornamental lights. There are no people; the wet street shows it has rained; we see garbage cans and police barriers. The irony of religion, tackiness, and the missing crowds is handled lightly. A simple picture done well.

“Halloween” (1976) is an animated picture of six figures in tuxedos and top hats under a decorative cartoon bat, with two other people in the foreground. This is a more complex image, with the people moving in different planes and several directions, but it captures the antic, camp mood of the holiday, and shows that Hujar had absorbed Brassai’s photographs of Parisian nightlife well enough to fashion his own idiom.

There are also several interesting photographs of automobiles: “Parked Painted Car” (1978), “Hot Rod on Village Street” (1978), “Burnt-Out Car” (1976), and “Abandoned Car, NJ” (1985). These are mostly profiles of the cars, formally presented, with intimations of significance. Hujar was born in Trenton, N.J., into, I believe, a working-class environment where cars and particularly hot rods would have been a significant part of the culture. These pictures are a meditation on that aspect of the automobile in American life.

But much of Hujar’s work, especially his later work, is more mannered. Gray midtones are abandoned for blacker blacks, whiter whites, and an overall cast of gothic moodiness. The contrasts have been tweaked for greater drama, but the result is too artificial to have a sustained impact.

The group of ruins, “Ruined Armchair With Record,” “Ruined Cupboard,” “Pornography on a Ruined Wall,” and “Ruined Plants” (all 1985), recalls the concept in poetry criticism of the unearned line, a sonorous line freighted with great meaning that fails because the lines that precede it have not prepared us for it. The pictures are clearly intended as memento mori by a man who may have felt himself a ruin, but come off as somehow labored.

The pictures of animals strike me as unexceptional, those of trees as overly fraught. “Metal Dump, New Jersey” (1985) and “Steel Ruins #3,” “#4,” and “#5” (all 1978) are unimpressive after seeing Edward Burtynsky’s handling of very similar material. The nihilism of “Masturbating Nude #1” (1977) is deeply saddening. The pictures of drag queens are difficult for me to assess: I spent too much time reading Aristophanes’s plays – in which men with womanish manners are generically comic – to think they can be anything but funny. If not, then they must be either grotesque or bathetically sentimental, the only aesthetic options available to the nihilist Peter Hujar seems to have become as he faced his awful end.

Shore until January 23; Hujar until January 16 (22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084).