Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum started photographing Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1999 and kept at it as the neighborhood changed around them. The title Remnants is precise about the subject: traditional businesses, places of worship, residents, and old-world architecture that carried immigrant life through much of the twentieth century, rather than skyline or landmark. Radius Books published the collection in a hardcover volume of 136 pages holding 120 images. It joins a long photographic conversation about this part of the city, one that includes Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890.

Where Riis’s book was an indictment of living and working conditions, Russek and Scheinbaum work nearer to portraiture. Their attention falls on storefronts and synagogues, faces and facades, the interiors and details that keep a block legible to the people who use it. The manner is patient rather than spectacular. Because two photographers share credit across the project, no single signature governs the sequence; the collection holds together by consistency of purpose instead.

That purpose acquired urgency as gentrification remade the Lower East Side, a process the photographers followed for years before the book appeared. In 2008 the National Trust for Historic Preservation added the neighborhood to its list of America’s Most Endangered Places. The worry running through the book is that customs, foods, and beliefs brought by successive waves of immigrants may disappear along with the buildings that housed them.

Essays by Amy Stein-Milford and Sean Corcoran frame the plates, and the book’s design lets the images read as a sustained record rather than a gathering of views. For collectors of documentary and urban photography, Remnants matters less as a nostalgic souvenir than as a considered account of a neighborhood at a particular historical moment, made by two photographers who returned for years and knew what they were looking at.