Courtesy of Wolfgang Tillmans and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

It’s no secret that Wolfgang Tillmans has a special feeling for the men around him. In his portrait photographs, he examines them from every angle, indoors and out, in groups and alone, clothed and not. Sometimes he treats them as objects of desire and other times as simply as objects of curiosity. What’s strange is that, despite his camera’s studied distance from its subjects — friends in Tillman’s circle of acquaintance or landscapes, or rumpled clothing — his pictures read as very personal statements: Here are the people and the things I like and this is the way I like to see them. Which is part of their seduction.

The German-born photographer, who divides his time between Berlin and his longtime home in London, brings the same eroticism to his photographs of fashion, the natural world, city skylines and club culture. And “The Day Before You Came,” a compact show of modest prints in a project room of Andrea Rosen Gallery, is mostly about being a guy with a heat-seeking camera.

Tillmans’s eye sees a pair of white jeans hanging on a hook as a pendulous figure exuding an air of anticipation. A marble bust of a young man has a mottled, cracked and time-worn surface, but Tillmans still draws an admiring, and lifelike, gaze from it, despite its weirdly rolled-back eyes. Even ancient pyramids that he shot for a 2005 black-and-white photograph look expectant and aroused, perhaps because of what seems to be a cell tower in the distance behind them.

Usually, Tillmans exhibits his work in a variety of formats that he prints from postage-stamp size to humongous, and pins them to gallery walls, unframed, in what can seem a haphazard scrapbook fashion. This show is different, mainly because Tillmans didn’t install the photos himself. The selection and display are the work of Stefan Kalmar, the director of the nonprofit Artists Space in SoHo and the second guest curator in a series of pocket exhibitions that the gallery has arranged to highlight the inventory of one its stars.

The two dozen pictures on view date from 1991 to 2010, are a uniform 16-by-12 inches, and neatly line the walls at eye level. Kalmar brings out the formalist structure of each image, hinting at Tillmans’s many experiments with camera-less, color-field abstractions made in the darkroom by exposing paper to chemicals and light.

A portrait of three friends lounging on a bed — Kalmar is one of them — is as much about the color and composition of its elements as the easy camaraderie between its subjects. The underwater figure in “Nightswimmer,” a beauty from 1998, is barely visible beneath the inescapably phallic reflections of light on the ripples in a darkened pool. And Kalmar’s own wit is apparent in the pairing of a photograph focused on the back of a woman’s very strange hairdo with a close-up of a similar-looking caterpillar.

Straightforward portraits are just as physical; even a toucan directly confronting the camera has a suggestive expression. But generally the photographs here speak from, and to, a distinctly human, and male, sensibility.

In “Abstract Pictures,” a monograph just published by Hatje Cantz, Tillmans asks, “When does a picture become a picture?” Clearly, it’s when the guy behind the image is fascinated with both subject and medium, and knows how to give coolness a fever.

“The Day Before You Came” is on view through the end of July at Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street.