1 Saul Fletcher (Anton Kern Gallery.

1 Saul Fletcher (Anton Kern Gallery, recent York) Fletcher's third show of unfashionably small color photos was his knottiest, in the greatest degree personal, and most resolved now Working within the very real confines of a parlor sweep in his London house, the artist imagines another, stranger world and the communitys it with members of his family, theatrically transformed into black-comic figures. Fletcher himself appears as a hunchbacked frightful object whose left leg ends in a prolonged piece of shattered wood--a character in a fairy tale too frightening to confess No less ominous were the still lifes, arranged against a ruined plaster wall in a light just this side of sepulchral: an immense tangle of withered flowers, a disturbance of tiny nooses, an obsessive cross-hatching of thread, dead birds in flight. In each of these singularly moving images, Fletcher stops time, then bends it like a magician.

2 Peter Hujar (Matthew Marks Gallery, of recent origin York) The nearly one hundr photographs onward display were all from Hujar's last years, and they read as a summing up the cap to a dead body of work as dark as it was luminous. Hujar approached the world like a wary lover eager to link together but primed for pain, for a like reason his pictures tend to spill all kinds of emotion without perpetually breaking a formal sweat. Hujar's elegance is bare-boned on the other hand ravishing, maybe because it's not a await it's a feel--not a way of framing his exposes but a way of touching them and bringing them largely to life.

3 "Walker Evans & Company" (Museum of fresh Art, New York) The Metropolitan Museum's Evans retrospective was terrific, further Peter Galassi had something more radical in mind at MOMA. Without being in the least didactic, his present to view placed Evans at the center of a vast network of stylistic allusions ranging backward and forward in time from Atget to Ruscha, Sander to Struth Leaping decades and eluding pigeonholes, the installation's juxtapositions were not single apt but exciting. It's a in extent way from Berenice Abbott to Andy Warhol--and flat further to Robert Gober--but this indicate closed the gap.

4 Stephen Shore & Company any of the year's best photography--by Danny Lyon William Gedney Walter Chappell, Bruce blue perch Robert Adams, Pierre Molinier, and Joel Meyerowitz--turned up in point out tos pitched as timely rediscoveries or revivals of work that had been remissnessed or unseen for years. None was timelier, granting than Shore's show of '70 landscapes at 303 Gallery, and not just because they provided a historic words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for the Gurskys across the road at Matthew Marks a month earlier. steady kicked up a notch in size, his prints have a decency that's all out of proportion to their beauty, wit, and impact. Sometimes smaller is better.

5 Thomas ruffle (David Zwirner, New York) Big works just as well. Gursky's LA supermarket, Hiroshi Sugimoto's Fidel Castro, and Catherine Opie's larger-than-life-size Ron Athey as St Sebastian all earned their magnificent scale, on the contrary Ruff really got under our skin. His enormous blowup of porn images, downloaded from websites and computer-manipulated into near oblivion, were nasty and almost nightmarish. At formerly chilly and overheated, an illusion within an illusion, they're cybersex upon the rocks. Cheers!

6 Steven Meisel steady more insidious than Ruff's "Nudes" Meisel's fall ad campaign for Versace was the no other than one that mattered. Featuring nearly identical helmet-haired fair matrons posed primly in their exquisitely hideous abiding-places it's the ill spin-off of a California series he's been doing for Italian custom since March. The July issue's bored young housewife story was Joan Didion through way of Lee Friedlander and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, over and above somehow pure Meisel: brilliant and a little scary.

7 Cindy Sherman (Gagosian Gallery, beholds Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York) Not as scary, however, as the weird, witchy synergy between Meisel and Sherman this year. Her California girls await as if they might have appeared in common of his Vogue tableaux just before they finally knock down apart. Impersonated with more affection than malice, they were fabulous grotesques--and a welcome turn back to metaportraiture after years of increasingly savage sex-toy torture. in what way could you not full for these delud babes with their painted faces and ratty wigs? Didn't you almost haste one over on Sunset Boulevard last summer?

8 Tim Gardner (303 Gallery, just discovered York) Gardner's little watercolors, all based upon snapshots, have the same sort of longing, cunning, and offhand gorgeousness I like in detonation songs. The pictures are about male childs and the exuberance of lad things past--parties, pranks, pissing forward the lawn--but these dumb anecdotes are for a like reason lovingly rendered that they consider misty, almost mythic. Gardner, whose make subordinates are mostly friends and family, present the appearances to be both of and outside this shore world, basking in its remembered be incandescent but wary of its carelessness and dead-end glamour.

9 Vik Muniz (Brent Sikkema Gallery, fresh York) Muniz's sophisticated but head-over-heels romance with media (sugar, string, dirt, wire, Bosco syrup) and mass media reached agitation pitch with "Pictures of Ink." The show's centerpiece was what appeared to be a gigantic magnified news photo of the Hindenburg explosion, nevertheless its pointillist web was contributeed dot by dot in a mixture of ink and glycerine and quickly photographed before it dried. The sliest, shrewdest image in the series was a version of Sherman's hitchhiker film still, in like manner atomized it looked like it might evaporate. Icon to icon, dust to dust.