There are some things money can’t buy: for example, intimacy. Few people, rich or poor, really like to disclose their financial standing to the world — which means a photographer interested in wealth and poverty needs a special gift for seduction. Whether depicting privation, as in Gordon Parks’s indelible essay of a struggling Harlem family, or privilege, as in the high society portraits of Tina Barney, the most powerful images of American money rely on trust. They are mutual exchanges between lenser and lensed, although there is always a third element in the frame: the economy itself.

Few photographers have reckoned with money as consistently as Lauren Greenfield, a photojournalist and director of documentaries like the housing-bubble fable “The Queen of Versailles.” Her subjects are socialites and cosmetic surgery patients, fashion-obsessed preteens and bankrupted property flippers, child beauty queens and aging strippers. And she, too, has a gift for winning her subjects’ trust, whether at a Beverly Hills high school or on a Beijing polo field.

Yet where older photographers like Ms. Barney depict wealth with a certain chill, Ms. Greenfield prefers heat — bold color and strong moral objection. Her exhibition “Generation Wealth,” on view at the International Center of Photography on the Bowery, is a bitter, reproving tour of her 25 years exploring American and global materialism, and it’s accompanied by a glistening cinder block of a publication, filled with over 500 pages of diamonds, collagen and Birkin bags. (The show initially appeared at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles; a related film is due out soon.)