AT TWILIGHT ON a rainy Saturday in late fall, Torrington, Conn., feels like any rusted-out postindustrial Northeastern mill town: barely alive. Between abandoned brick factories, faded clapboard houses with tar-paper-covered roofs creak in the wind. Under the eaves of the Sons of Italy social club, patrons smoke beside a sign for Wednesday bingo. Although nestled in Litchfield County, the preternaturally preserved Revolutionary War-era enclave where many wealthy New Yorkers keep second homes, Torrington remains an uncharted territory to most of those residents.

But a few years ago, the debonair 66-year-old Tunisian-born photographer Gerald Incandela — a Manhattan fixture whose work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — became an unlikely champion of this town of 35,000. Instead of denying the rust, he has embraced it, exploring the complex relationship between high culture and urban decay in the 5,000-square-foot former pool hall off the town’s desolate Main Street he bought as his studio in 2012. Here, there is no artists’ colony of young gentrifiers with fixed-gear bicycles and feral facial hair. There is just Incandela, in the cavernous space he has shaped into a patchworked homage to high Viennese culture, the bordellos of New Orleans and SoHo’s raw glory days.

“People don’t understand this town, but l love the people and the history,” he says, standing in the doorway of the boxy one-story building, topped with a row of mismatched early 20th-century iron finials salvaged from railroad signal posts. Incandela is as long and lean as he was in the late 1970s, when he began making his moody pieces that combine multinegative photography with painterly splashes of developer. (This is also the period he became Robert Mapplethorpe’s rival for the affection of the collector and patron Sam Wagstaff.) “I love how the studio fits in here, yet it’s so mysterious,” he says. “You don’t have any idea of what you are walking into from the outside.”