Toward the end of 1979, Brian Rose and Edward Fausty began roaming the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a Japanese view camera attached to a tripod. New York City’s fiscal crisis was a fresh memory, and gentrification had not yet arrived. Tenements seemed to burn daily. But the frontierlike nature of the neighborhood and the availability of cheap rent encouraged an explosion of creativity.

Mr. Rose decided the time was worth documenting, and for about a year the two men photographed the local landscape. People appear in those frames, but they are rarely the focus. Mr. Rose and Mr. Fausty instead concentrated on the structures and shapes that made up the neighborhood, including bridges, empty lots and buildings with bricked-up windows.

“I really am interested in the spatial quality of where we live,” Mr. Rose said recently, adding that he was drawn to “the buildings we occupy and the physical containers that are critical to who we are.”

Around 2010, Mr. Rose began documenting the neighborhood a second time, again using a view camera and sometimes seeking out the same spots he visited in 1980. Images from both projects have been made into a book called “Time and Space on the Lower East Side,” and on Thursday, an exhibition of pictures from the book will open at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea.