Fixing their gaze on familiar and mundane spaces, the four artists of in(habitations) make us see them anew, bringing to light unexpected depths of pathos and poetry.

Frank Armstrong presents vistas of rural America from the vantage point of forlorn, empty cemeteries. Armstrong’s coolly elegant photographs combine the iconic modernism of Walker Evans and Robert Adams with a distinctively contemporary sensibility. The cemeteries (“Buzzard”, “Paradise”, “Weed”) act as both ironic metaphors and dead-serious speculation about mortality’s stubborn mysteries.

Stephen DiRado's dinner images cast the table as a magical stage-set for a rich theater of social interaction. They function as portraits of individuals, families, and groups of friends; his large-format silver prints document the varying moods and textures of the improvised performances that emerge as evening unfolds.

Laura Letinsky mines the fertile border between documentary and staged tableaux. Her lush color prints of creepy, claustrophobic spaces evoke the hit- and- (mostly) miss quality of contemporary domesticity. Letinsky’s fractured narratives of couples, and the mordant excesses of her still lifes, invite us to complete her stories—or invent our own.

Alec Soth photographs people and places in the Mississippi River valley. His images distill with singular, quiet intensity an elegiac response to the poverty he encounters there. Like Eggleston, Soth is a master of intense, unsettling color. The shacks and furnishings Soth details suggest loss, but also evoke the strategies of escape and transcendence of the people who live there.