During his late 20s, while living in Chicago from 1988 to 1991, photographer Mark Steinmetz spent much of his time capturing images of everyday people in everyday situations. “I kind of think of myself as an archaeologist, but living in the time and just describing it,” says Steinmetz, 64, a former Guggenheim fellow who now resides in Athens, Georgia, and whose works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions. “Most photography is about happy people, thumbs-up kind of things, or dramatic moments,” he notes. But he’s more interested in what he describes as “shades of boredom,” an emotion he thinks is “underdescribed in our culture.”

A number of his Chicago photos — shot with 35 mm and medium format cameras and developed in the bedroom of his Wrigleyville apartment — have appeared in books he has published over the years. But many more were stashed away, largely unseen by the public for three and a half decades. Taken mainly on the North Side and downtown, they have finally gotten their moment in his new book, Chicago (Nazraeli Press), and in a recent exhibition at the Stephen Daiter Gallery here.

Steinmetz says he shot the series in black and white partly as an homage to the famous street photographers Weegee and Helen Levitt and partly because, free of a focus-stealing layer of color, the work is “more purely about light.” Though his images are a human-centric time capsule of the city, they don’t attempt to make a larger statement about the Chicago of that era: “You frame a portion of the world, and you’re left with just the facts within that frame.”