Desert Light Throckmorton Fine Art 145 E. 57th St., third floor Through Sept. 12  Why endless stretches of barren sand should make a strong appeal to our imaginations is a bit of a mystery, but the first picture in this exhibition does just that. In Marilyn Bridges’s aerial photograph “Desertscape, Death Valley, CA, 1991,” the undulating dunes look like folds in a rumpled bed sheet. The bird’s-eye view from an indeterminate height deprives us of our sense of scale, and an area that may be many square miles becomes an expressive abstraction until the discovery of some recognizable objects in the lower right corner restores the image to the real world. Edward Weston’s “Oceano, 1936” presents the desert’s dunes from ground level as they recede in diminishing waves into the distance.  Mark Cohen’s “Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking, Scranton, PA, 1977.”  The intense desert light turns the plants in Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s “Organ Cacti, Mexico, 1929-30” into alternating patterns of black and white, with their delicate needles appearing particularly sharp. The light lets us see the plant in Marina Yampolsky’s undated close-up “Columna Salomonica/Salomonic Column, Sierra de Puebla” in minute detail. Elisabeth Sunday has three statuesque full-length portraits of robed figures of the Sahara Desert, and Andre De Dienes litters the sand with a nude. Graciela Iturbide and Brett and Cole Weston are represented by studies of geology and desert flora.  Mark Cohen: True Color Hasted Hunt 529 W. 20th St., third floor Through Aug. 28  Almost the entire left side of “Legs and Boy in Pool, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 1977” is taken up with the flesh tones of a woman’s legs bent at the knees. A little of a black bathing suit is visible between her thighs, and part of a white plastic chaise longue where her feet must be. On the right side of the picture is the green grass of a backyard, the red wood of a fence, and the bright aqua-blue trapezoid of the end of a distant swimming pool. The head of a boy with black hair sticks up from the corner of the pool and looks toward the legs through the oval frame of a red diving mask. Mark Cohen was part of the first generation to master the art of color photography so that color is indispensable to his work.  Mr. Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre in 1943, and he photographs the working-class life in and around his hometown. The “Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking, Scranton, PA, 1977” is about 12 years old and mugs for the camera in front of three of his friends. The young boy in “Karate Stance, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 1977” and the “Girl with Bat and Ball, Plymouth, PA, 1977” are other examples of Mr. Cohen’s appealing handling of both children and color. All we see of “The Woman with Red Lips Smoking, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 1975” is her mouth and one aged hand holding a lit cigarette. The prints in this exhibition benefit from being made with the complex dye transfer process which produces rich, deeply saturated colors.  Sexy and the City: New York Photographs Yossi Milo Gallery 525 W. 25th St. Through Aug. 28  The centerpiece of this group show is an 11-by-14-inch vintage print of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square, August 15, 1945.” As news spread that the long war had finally ended, New Yorkers gravitated toward Times Square to celebrate. A sailor in his dress blues and white Dixie cup sailor’s hat took a nurse in her white uniform and bent her backward in an embrace. The image of this kiss is like the marriage at the end of a Shakespearean comedy; it signals the restoration of order.  The actual degree of sexuality in the other 30 pictures ranges from a naked couple fornicating in Alvin Baltrop’s “Untitled (Pier Photograph), 1975-1986” to the demure profile of the sleeping subject in Mitch Epstein’s “Untitled, New York (Woman in Midtown Taxi), 1995,” a large-format chromogenic print. Somewhere in between are Diane Arbus’s enervated “Young Couple on a Bench, N.Y.C., 1965,” Nan Goldin’s extravagantly done-up drag queen in “Joey at the Love Ball, NYC, 1991,” and the smoochers in Weegee’s voyeuristic “3-D Lovers in a Movie Theater, circa 1955.” Other pictures of couples kissing include Charles Harbutt’s “New Year’s Eve, Times Square, 1960,” Leon Levinstein’s “Untitled (kissing on the lawn), 1970s,” Arthur Leipzig’s “Subway Lovers, 1949” and Louis Faurer’s “Penn Station, NYC, 1948.”  Tim Hetherington: Liberia, Long Story Bit by Bit Umbrage 111 Front St., Suite 208, Brooklyn Through Aug. 14  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought with photojournalists embedded in the frontline troops; their digital pictures of the combat are transmitted to the world via the Internet in something close to real time. The civil war in Liberia was more of a rumor than a news event, unseen and not a concern to the wider world. British photojournalist Tim Hetherington spent four years in Liberia beginning in 2003, often living behind the lines with the young men and women of LURD, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, the ragtag army that finally overthrew dictatorial President Charles Taylor. Umbrage Editions has published a book of his pictures and reportage, and there are 17 28-by-28-inch color prints on display at its gallery in Brooklyn’s Dumbo section.  Mr. Hetherington used a medium-format Rolleiflex to take detailed images that document the savagery of the conflict. “LURD fighter, Tubmanberg, Bomi Country, 2003” is one of many sensitive portraits, in this case a young man in camouflage fatigues posing with a hand grenade. In “LURD fighters, Monrovia, 2003,” a young man in the antiaircraft brigade and his girlfriend exchange words during a pause in heavy fighting. There are pictures in which it is clear the soldiers are merely children. Several pictures record graffiti, walls covered with seemingly insane tags and crude drawings of rape and murder. The Liberian conflict’s one methodical chronicler has produced a testament of indelible impressions.
Desert Light at Throckmorton Fine Art, Mark Cohen at Hasted Hunt, New York photos at Yossi Milo and Tim Hetherington at Umbrage