Middle of the night is my time, always has been, especially in New York in the summer. The city looks better, sounds better, feels softer, or at least a little less specific. I think and remember better late, or imagine I do. I thought of all this when I saw a penumbral little summer exhibition at the Met titled ''Night Vision: Photography After...

''I'm very careful not to have ideas, because they're inaccurate,'' the artist Agnes Martin says in Mary Lance's touching documentary about her, but it's a lie. Ms. Martin was full of ideas, and she dispenses them engagingly in the course of the film, ''Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World,'' made from 1998 to 2002. Ms. Martin, who died in 2004...

FROM my apartment near the top of Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, I watched two lines of black smoke as thick and slow as oil spills pour across the sky far downtown. In my mind, that morning, I also stood in another apartment, just below the World Trade Center, and it was 1974. That year I had moved into a small 19th-century tenement with plank...