IRVING PENN
Pace/MacGill, 32 E. 57th St. 212-759-7999
Through Nov. 5
The flip side of Penns rigorous elegance is an unexpectedly earthy taste for grunge and decay: cigarette butts, gutter debris, animal bones, human skulls. In Underfoot, his subject is primarily chewing gum, photographed on the sidewalk where he found it, caked and embedded with hair, soot, and stray bits of urban grit. The resulting black-and-white images have been subtly toned, they have a warm, alluring glow, but they remain rude and exhilaratingly abrasive. Scaled to fit alongside small paintings, they look like found Dubuffets: arty ruffians who might track mud on the carpet but wouldnt be uncomfortable in the drawing room.
The New City: Sub/Urbia in Recent Photography.
Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Ave. at 75th St. (800-944-8639)
Through Jan. 15.
ANDRE KERTESZ
ICP, International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
Through Nov. 27
THE PERFECT MEDIUM, Photography and the Occult
Metropolitan Museum, Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)
Through Dec. 31
SHIRIN NESHAT
Barbara Gladstone, 515 W. 24th St. 212-206-9300
Through Nov. 12
Two new video installations by the Iranian artist and filmmaker, part of a series based on Shahrnush Parsipurs novel Women without Men.
SUSAN PAULSEN
Bell, 511 W. 25th St. 212-691-3883
Through Oct. 29
Paulsens small, quiet photographs of what appears to be a comfortable, if not conspicuously privileged, life are refreshingly out of synch with the times. No one makes pictures of their pets, farm animals, handsome children, ripe produce, or folded linens anymore not outside of the pages of Martha Stewart Living, at least. But Paulsen, who doesn’t take the good life for granted, records its details with unabashed but finely measured delight. Because shes not worried about making masterpieces, she relaxes and frames simple pleasures with an alert, grateful eye.
