Nearly all the 40 black-and-white images by Japanese photographer Akio Ohki in his exhibition “Taiwan 1971–1978,” currently at Sepia International, are absurdly mannered, but they work. This is partly because he exploits stylistic devices not uncommon in the practice of the Japanese visual arts — certainly not uncommon in Japanese photographic practice — and partly because these devices are appropriate to his subject matter. If the pictures tend to be grim, Taiwan in the concluding days of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government was plausibly a grim place.

The mannerism that is used in virtually every image consists of intense blacks. These are not just dark, but really black blacks, blacks from which light struggles to emerge. Maybe the blackest single photograph is the last in the exhibition,”Ludao Island.”The bottom third of the picture seems all black with just some meager hints of what might be hidden in the dense, inky darkness. Above that band of black, to the right, is the brightest element in the picture, light reflecting off wet macadam, a road. The road passes between some large but low-storied buildings whose shapes and sizes are suggested by the glint of light off their wet roofs. Above the buildings is a lowering sky against which some poles and the wires connecting them are seen in silhouette: They take on more significant than they would in a world with better illumination.

All of this is very ominous, but then the exhibition image list notes about “Ludao Island”: “Almost all of the political prisoners were concentrated in this remote Pacific island, 33 kilometers off the coast of Taitung.” There is nothing specifically threatening in the picture — there are no guard towers or barbed-wire fences — and, in fact, the buildings may be warehouses. But the extensive use of black creates a sense of hovering menace that makes it possible — probable — to imagine the worst for the unseen inhabitants of these structures.

Black is also a major component of “Mr. K., a retired soldier from the Continent living at the Ami Village, Tulan, Taitung Prefecture.”There are two men seen from about the shoulder up in the lower right corner of this picture, and it is not clear which is Mr. K., although I expect he is the taller, bigger one on the far right. This man has a wide-mouthed grim suggestive of someone who is glad to have escaped death in combat. The other man has a benign expression and holds his head back at an odd angle. Both men are wearing plain white Tshirts and are close together in an embrace. It is not clear what the relationship between the two men is.

That is not all that is unclear. In the darkness that is the backdrop of the two men, a group of three men can be made out in the lower middle of the image. They appear to be huddling together, perhaps working, but it is too dark to tell, so dark that the spatial relationship between the two groups of men is ambiguous. Much here is inscrutable, drowned in an enveloping black, but what emerges from the darkness is a mystery we are tickled to resolve.

To a considerable extent the photographic culture of Japan in the decades after World War II evolved around cheap photo books whose pictures were dark because the publishers could not afford the more expensive printing techniques that would have produced finer grays, and hence more nuanced images. Some photographers embraced this look. Daido Moriyama made a point of having his books of seamy urban life printed on cheap paper from over-inked plates so they would resemble his hero Weegee’s pictures in the tabloids. Mr. Ohki waited three decades to publish his pictures from Taiwan, but they are of their time.

Another mannered device Mr. Ohki makes extensive use of is the off-kilter horizon. You can tell that the unseen horizon in “Ludao Island” is slightly tilted because the verticals cant a bit, but the camera is on at least a steep 45-degree angle to the horizon in “Lanhsu Island,” “Exposed to strong winds, Makung, Penghu Islands,” “Downtown Kaohsiung,” and “Puli.”This is reminiscent of many familiar Japanese prints, and, as they do, suggests a world that is not quite stable. The effect is aesthetic, but the cause in many instances was political: Mr. Ohki was not supposed to be taking pictures and had to shoot from the hip. Then again, serendipity is often a part of Japanese art making.

In “Lanhsu Island” the horizon is where the sea meets the sky, and it tips up radically to the right. To the left a woman wearing a floral print dress is walking aslant, falling out of the frame. Behind her is a low stonewall that runs from the bottom left corner to the upper right, and behind the wall is the top of a modern building with a corporate logo incorporating letters from the Latin alphabet. The foreground, the sea, and the woman’s face are characteristically dark, but the face is seen in profile and her concern — about some matter of importance — is evident.

And Mr. Ohki is adept at fortuitous juxtaposition. In “The day of a festival, Puli” most of the frame is occupied by a middle-aged man in a Western-style suit and white shirt who stands with his back to the camera holding a white goat with his right hand and petting its head with his left. The expression on the face of the goat is one of calm. In the right foreground is a teenage girl, or anyway half of her face and a hand. From the one eye we can see, and from the set of her brow and her mouth, that she appears troubled about something. In the same way there is no aphoristic couplet at the end of a haiku that sums up its meaning, we are left here to work out for ourselves what these disparate parts have to do with one aother. Or we can just let the dissonance resonate.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until December 23 (148 W.24th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, eleventh floor, 212-645-9444).