Jeff Lion Weinstock is a native New Yorker whose photographs pay homage to the city and what you might call secret spectacles. His "Walls" update Aaron Siskind and the whole great 1950s New York School by scouting fresh materials and sites and tinkering with colors -- a mix of acid and cool -- that gently, almost serenely nudge ready-made abstraction into a fresh century. His found metal objects nod gratefully toward Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Moholy-Nagy and artists like Klee, but find in them ghosts and faces, a kind of animated archaeology, not unfunny, deadpan and archaic. Weinstock has spent a lifetime coming to know these little, serendipitous things, these abandoned, redolent objects just laying there, waiting for someone patient, with open eyes and a measured, modest perspective, to recognize them for what they are. "In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject," Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, adding that "the creative instant lasts but a brief moment." Weinstock seizes it, time and again.

Michael Kimmelman