Sophie Calle, the iconoclastic and irreverent French artist who regularly combines text and image in works that can be both provocative and poignant, is the subject of two concurrent exhibitions in New York City. Her work can be (or seem) intensely autobiographical, and in other instances highly collaborative. In works that are often characterized by absence, Calle seems to be on the hunt, herself, for ways to understand people in all their complexity, through the accumulated bits of evidence she collects.

A Magnum photographer who has published numerous photography books through his own imprint, Ugly Dog, Sohrab Hura has come to mistrust the medium of photography, or at least the way documentary photography has been produced and consumed.

Lee Mary Manning practices a lost art: looking closely and paying attention. Their photographic compositions are comprised of snapshot-sized prints of closely observed details—a braid, a sunflower, the zipper of a sweatshirt—often combined with carefully chosen bits of ephemera (decorative paper bags, a tangle of yarn). The resulting works—far more than the sum of their parts—are deceptively simple and deeply evocative.