Giving his regard to Broadway

A photographer follows the street

The show of Cervin Robinson's work at MIT consists of 32 photos made over a period of 35 years. (CERVIN ROBINSON)

CAMBRIDGE - Every photographer sees, and therefore records, a different world. That's one of the things that makes the art of photography so fascinating. Each photographer doesn't merely document the world but creates a new one, one you may never have noticed before.

That's as true of architectural photography as of any other kind. It's certainly true of Cervin Robinson, an artist whose work is now in a superb exhibit at MIT.

The show, called "By Way of Broadway," consists of 32 photographs of sites along Broadway in Manhattan. Robinson made them over a period of 35 years, from 1972 to 2007.

As Robinson notes, Broadway is the only major street in Manhattan that moves at an angle to the street grid. As a result, it creates a slightly odd condition whenever it crosses a side street or an avenue. Some of those oddities generate major sites, like Times Square. Other sites are quiet byways - a word that is punningly hidden in the show's title.

It's a brilliant show. Robinson's world, to simplify a little, is a world of flat-fronted buildings that face us directly and seem to be posing for their portraits. Their often richly sculpted facades remind you of the stiff shirts or rich gowns people once wore for such portraits. Sometimes they seem to be thrusting forward toward us; at other times they line up along the sidewalk like soldiers at attention.

That's one major theme. The other is collage. Robinson loves to find and record places where something new is collaged over something old. A huge red Checks Cashed Open 24 Hours billboard splashes across what once, clearly, was an elegant movie theater in the Art Deco style. An auto body shop, with a phony castle-like façade, shoves itself rudely in front of a decayed object that appears once to have been a grand memorial arch. As we perceive such scenes, we visually peel back the present to reveal the past. Robinson is, among other things, a photographer of time itself.

Some architectural photographers think of themselves as photographing space - the indoor space of rooms, or the outdoor space of streets, squares, and landscapes. Robinson rarely does that. He photographs solid objects. He crams a lot into his frames. In the juxtapositions that result, buildings or objects of different eras comment on one another across time.

This is not the New York of genteel tree-lined streets in the East 60s or the West Village. It's the brassy, ever-changing world of Broadway, where new pushes past old and things crash into one another in unexpected ways. Bizarre juxtapositions are, after all, the special DNA of New York.

Robinson dates his interest in photography from a high school trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he first saw the photographs of Walker Evans, perhaps the greatest of American photographers. He later worked for Evans, off and on, for four years in the 1950s, and claims he even lived for spells in Evans's darkroom. There's still a lot of Evans in his work -a love of billboards and signage of all kinds, a fascination with decaying architecture, and a kind of deliberate flatness and lack of perspectival depth. You'd never mistake one artist for the other, but you can see the family descent.

At the opening of the exhibit on April 17, Peter Bacon Hales, a professor in the art history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, talked a lot about the Evans influence, but also found some fresh ways of describing Robinson. The images, he said, "might best be called not architectural photographs but pictures of American sites."

He went on: "To look at Robinson's Broadway work, I suggest, is to see him wrestling to find ways to adapt a stable, architectonic, even monumental form of photograph to an erratic, chaotic, heedless, often destructive, multilayered American culture."

That puts it well. Often the strength of a Robinson image lies in the tension between its formal order and the chaos of its subject

Hales also said: "The sober, solid ornamental declarations of one era serve as backdrop to the street's drama, backstop but also, I'd suggest, parental presence."

Sober old parent buildings being pushed into the background by colorful children? It's by inspiring that kind of deep reading that a photographer achieves greatness.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.