In an image-saturated world, Fotografiska — a Stockholm institution that has recently established an outpost in New York — aims to lure people off their phones to venture out to see photographs displayed on walls. The strategy is brilliant: provide in the real world what people seek in virtual reality. Give them a community that revolves around photographs, and which in turn will supply them with pictures they can funnel back into their Instagram feeds.

Within a landmark building in the Flatiron district that stays open every night until 11 or midnight, Fotografiska offers a cafe, bar and bookstore on the ground floor and an elegant restaurant (named Veronika after the patron saint of photography) for dinner one floor up. All these dining and shopping spaces are thronged. Veronika, with an Eastern and Central European menu, is booked solid for the next month.

And then, oh yes, there are the galleries. Occupying the third, fourth and fifth floors, in rooms that are windowless to preserve the photographs and characterless to allow for flexibility, hang the works that are Fotografiska’s purported reason for being.