Photography was a hobby for Bill Rauhauser for much of his life. Born and raised in Detroit, a city that made things, he worked as an architectural engineer and took pictures on the side. That all changed on a business trip to New York City in 1947, when he caught an exhibit by Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art. He was amazed by the pictures, and even more so by the words he read in a booklet about the show.

“He was quoted as saying photography is a hobby,” Mr. Rauhauser recalled. “O.K. Then he said the magic words, ‘The art is in the seeing.’ O.K., now I had something. I sort of felt there was a future for photography as an art form. That changed my whole attitude toward it.”

A second epiphany followed once he returned to photographing on the streets of the Motor City: Detroit wasn’t Paris.

“I had to figure out how to do something that’s special about Detroit to replace or match up with what Bresson was doing,” Mr. Rauhauser said. “It took me awhile, but I began to realize there was something special about Detroit.”

That sentiment inspired him, sending him back to the streets, where he compiled a compelling and panoramic document of Detroit. Stretching from the 1930s into the 21st century, it is an antidote to the seemingly unending stream of images of Detroit as simply a city in ruins. He has proved himself to be a quintessential street photographer presenting a distinct vision of a place you think you know, but don’t.

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Born in 1918, Mr. Rauhauser got into photography as a young man, starting out with a simple plastic camera. As he grew more interested, he traded his stamp collection to a friend, who gave him an Argus 35-millimeter camera (which he pressed into double duty as a makeshift enlarger).

He never gave up on photography — in fact, he was active in a camera club — but when he went to college it was to study architectural engineering, a field in which he worked for much of his adult life. The Cartier-Bresson show was a turning point in how he saw what photography could be. But a later encounter, in 1951, with Edward Steichen, who was giving a talk at the Detroit Institute of Arts, made him realize what he could be.

Steichen, who was head of the photography department at MoMa, talked about a coming show, “The Family of Man,” and invited people to submit their work. Mr. Rauhauser submitted three pictures; one was accepted for the show, which toured the world and resulted in a book. The experience — and validation — was a turning point for him.

As Mary Desjarlais noted in “Bill Rauhauser, 20th Century Photography in Detroit,” he did not favor what he saw as Cartier-Bresson’s deliberately arty compositions, going more for the reality of what he saw on the street.

“These are in no way premeditated or posed compositions,” she wrote. “Rauhauser simply saw the angles and rhythms in a street as another photographer may see people or events. With the randomness of street life he enjoyed discovering interrelationships within a seemingly chaotic universe.”

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Being there and being lucky are among the three “Iron Laws” of photography, Mr. Rauhauser said. So, too, is being ready.

“Being ready doesn’t mean just adjusting the camera,” he said. “The difficult part is to know enough about the culture that you’re photographing that you recognize significant images when they happen, significant situations, and don’t just waste time just photographing anything that comes along the plate.”

Sometimes he would spend a day prowling Detroit’s downtown streets and come up empty.

“You have to be aware of everything that might happen,” he said. “But the more you look and wait and keep out of sight, you can. Fortunately, I was skinny enough I could hide behind a telephone pole and nobody would see me.”

By 1970, he was able to leave engineering and devote himself totally to photography when he was asked to teach a history of photography course at what is now the College of Creative Studies. He did so for more than three decades, also teaching technical courses in photography.

“The first class I was in that first semester, I was in about 15, 20 minutes and I just stopped, silent,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘This is what I got to do.’ I think the students thought I had lost my place. I didn’t lose my place. I found my place.”

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Though he was a longtime Detroit resident, he moved to the suburbs after the riots of the late 1960s. As an engineer, he had seen impending economic problems, he said, when Southern states with right-to-work laws lured industry away with promises of cheaper — and nonunion — work forces.

Though he stopped photographing on the streets for a while — he felt that an old man with a camera might be seen as a target — he later returned, with the help of an African-American couple whom he befriended after a gallery talk. He said he thought the city was going to make a comeback, even if it takes time. His work already has, finding an eager audience among collectors.

“People now seem to be more interested in seeing how the city was,” Mr. Rauhauser said. “I think they’re getting a little tired of seeing abandoned buildings and wrecks and burned-out factories and enough is enough.”

He speaks of his work as having a balance, something that comes from having spent decades in engineering before crossing over into teaching.

“I did enjoy those two jobs,” he said. “What they did for me, I think, was give me a balanced view of the culture in Detroit, from the engineering to the labor groups I had to deal with and then from that I went into 30 years at the art school and the D.I.A. and the galleries in Detroit. I had a wonderful job in both places, but it did give me a great opportunity to see Detroit people from both sides of the coin.”

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