New York’s gallery scene is about to launch its new season come September, with First Thursday openings all over town. If the crowds swarming Chelsea’s galleries are anything like they were last fall,  get ready for the biggest peripatetic party of the year.

But for now, steal an hour for a quiet visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s small, elegaic exhibition, “On Photograpy: A Tribute to Susan Sontag” (through September 4.) A major force in New York intellectual life for over 40 years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was renowned for her incisive and impassioned writing on photography. This exhibition of some 40 photographs from the Metropolitan’s collection, together with texts drawn primarily from Sontag’s writings, offers broad insights and ideas about the medium and the ways in which it has shaped our world. Among photographers whose work is on display: August Sander, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Peter Hujar, and Robert Mapplethorpe

Holland Cotter of the New York Times writes, “In her second book of essays, “On Photography” (1977), [Sontag] grappled with the ethical mechanics of picture taking. And the conclusions she drew about photography as a larcenous, predatory, conscience-deadening medium have been hugely influential.

“This is the Sontag book the show focuses on, to the degree that it has a single focus. The curator, Mia Fineman, a senior research associate at the museum, accompanies the 40 pictures, from the museum’s collection with Sontag quotations, placed high on the walls, and leaves the play of images and words allusive rather than illustrative, free to generate mood as much as meaning, as Sontag would have wished.”

On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

Closing September 4

On Sontag: Essayist as Metaphor and Muse, by Holland Cotter

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

For a dramatic change of pace, visit “AngloMania,” an explosive romp through British fashion from 1976 to 2006. Over the past 30 years, British fashion has been defined by a knowing and self-conscious historicism. In their search for novelty, designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen have looked to past styles with an appetite that is as audacious as it is rapacious. Presented in a series of tableaux based on Britain’s rich artistic traditions and set in the Met’s English period rooms, the show creates a potent dialogue between the past and the present.

Closing September 4

Short List

Catch the final installment of P.S. 1’s Warm Up 2006

featuring The Glimmers (Eskimo, Belgium) and Mudd (Rong Music, UK)

Saturday, Aug 26, 2006 3:00 PM (12:00 PM Doors)  - Saturday, Aug 26, 2006 9:00 PM $10.00.

Walker Evans: Carbon and Silver

Large-scale digital prints, vintage prints, and published work by an American master

UBS Art Gallery

August 24 – November 17, 2006

Read Michael Kimmelman’s review in the New York Times

Eye of the Beholder: Photographs From the Collection of Richard Avedon   

Pace/MacGill Gallery

August 30 - September 6, 2006

Read Philip Gefter’s article about Avedon’s collection

Martin Schoeller: Close Up

Hasted Hunt Gallery

Closing September 1, 2006

Fall Preview

Jeff Brouws: Approaching Nowhere

Robert Mann Gallery

September 6, 2006

Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists

Adam Baumgold Gallery

September 6 – October 14, 2006

Lola Alvarez Bravo

Aperture Gallery

September 7 – November 2, 2006

Nancy Burson: Hand of God

ClampArt

September 7 – October 7, 2006

Elinor Carucci

Edwynn Houk Gallery

September 7 –October 21, 2006

Christopher Morris/My America

Hasted Hunt

September 7 - October 7, 2006

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Yossi Milo Gallery

September 7 - October 14, 2006

Fernanda Cohen/From Buenos Aires to New York

Consulate General of Argentina Art Gallery

212 603 0440

September 8 – September 29, 2006

William Christenberry

Pace MacGill Gallery

Jessie Mann "Self Possessed" / Photographs by Len Prince

Danziger Projects

September 9 - October 14, 2006

Photo: Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art