Ida Wyman, a photographer who in the 1940s and ’50s roamed New York and other cities to capture compelling images of everyday people working, playing, idling, dancing or selling newspapers, died on July 13 in Fitchburg, Wis., near Madison. She was 93.

Her death, in a hospice, was confirmed by Heather Garrison, her granddaughter.

Ms. Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a “special kind of happiness” in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers.

“Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed,” she said in an essay for the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, one of her dealers, “which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”