The wiles and whimsy of women through Elliott Erwitt’s lens.

Bottom line: A photo master offers his usual witty, thoughtful take on the human experience.

Elliott Erwitt’s photographs are a tale of two women. On one hand, the success stories, the lithe and stylish dames in cunning chapeaux, with expressive eyes. They preen in convertibles, looking far too glamorous for the drive-in fast-food restaurant where they stop in “Miami Beach, Florida, USA” (1962). Or they are captured mid-kiss, reflected in the rear-view mirror in a moment of romantic ecstasy with a perfect sunset in the distance in “California Kiss (Santa Monica)” (1955).

These are the iconic images that pop up as postcards at souvenir stands in Paris and New York, steeped in romance distilled into a singular image, the images that ornament college dorm rooms and first apartments. The kind of timeless black-and-white images that have made the 87-year-old Erwitt a master of his medium and a keen, often mischievously smirking, observer of the highs, lows and hilarity of contemporary life, a man the New York Times’ Ken Johnson called the “Henny Youngman of photographic one-liners.”

But in the exhibition “Elliott Erwitt: Regarding Women” (taken from a 2014 book of the same title) at Jackson Fine Art there are femininity’s failures too, as corollary to those triumphs. The blonde in a sky-high bouffant grooming a Pomeranian with a similar fluff-ball hairdo. The woman caught in her chic roadster in a hairnet and curlers, looking askance at the man with the camera who has busted her for public grooming.

“Regarding Women” also contains striking distillations of stolen moments in the sweeping narrative arc of a life; Erwitt’s shot “New York City, USA” (1955) for example, of a supremely elegant waitress with perfectly groomed eyebrows and hip hairstyle, taking a cigarette break at a restaurant lunch counter. The image makes you wonder about this woman’s life, her state of mind, what she thinks of her job, what she longs for in life: Erwitt certainly knew how to capture an intriguing subject.

For those prone to pangs of nostalgia, “Regarding Women” contains glimpses of a more glamorous, genteel age, when clothes mattered and women kitted themselves out for daily life like movie stars preparing to be besieged by paparazzi. Some of Erwitt’s images of women are pure glamour, or witty punchlines, but others like “New York City” crackle with depth and excitement and mysteries your eye longs to solve.

Erwitt has a devilish sense of humor and an eye for the foibles of the human condition and the inadvertent bits of comedy that mark ordinary life, like the gaggle of women, in ’50s swing coats and patent handbags, standing or sitting near a sign declaring “Lost Persons Area,” as if someone has misplaced a trio of housewives.

Erwitt’s rascally, impish side comes out in a rudely funny shot “Managua, Nicaragua” of an elderly woman seated on a bench and seen through Venetian blinds. A pair of melons stuck between the blinds at chest height create a crude visual joke, the kind of juxtaposition Erwitt finds irresistible. You can’t make this stuff up, Erwitt’s winking photos seems to declare, and life is stranger, more delicious and sillier than any fiction.

The female form is obviously a popular theme for male photographers: Saul Leiter’s nudes, in an adjoining gallery at Jackson, feature enough bare breasts to keep even Hugh Hefner happier than a pig in clover. It makes you grateful for an eye like Erwitt’s, which delights in all shades of human experience.