Every New York story ends up being a story about real estate; in New York,even a love story isn’t over until the couple decides which apartment to live in. And so it is not too surprising that Christine Osinski’s photo essay about a Staten Island neighborhood, “Notes From West Brighton,” on display at Silo, should be largely concerned with real estate.

West Brighton, more properly West New Brighton, is on the central north shore of Staten Island, much closer to Bayonne, N.J., than to Manhattan. Ms. Osinski arrived there in the early 1980s, when a fluctuation in the city’s real estate markets dispossessed her from a loft in Lower Manhattan. She set about the neighborhood with her 4-by-5 camera on its tripod, and produced “Walking Staten Island 1983-1984.” A decade later she stalked the aisles of the local grocery stores, discount stores, and malls with a medium-format camera to shoot “Staten Island Shoppers.” Work from both series is included in “Notes From West Brighton.”

“Men Working on House” (all pictures from the first series are dated 1983-84) shows two mostly identical houses fronted by lawns and bordered with driveways. One man is poking around for tools and materials in the open back doors of a van parked on the street. Another man is working on the roof of a portico on the nearer of the two houses. This portico is the main feature of the otherwise undistinguished two-story house; its three thin white columns are especially prominent because the rest of the front of the house is in shade. But they also stand out because of their presumption.

I once heard Denise Scott Brown, the noted architect and preservationist, give a lecture about vernacular architecture, the nonverbal expression of cultures in the construction of their shelter. She talked about the way homeowners – and most definitely including those in working-class neighbors – pick up on bits and pieces from traditional styles to give individuality and what they perceive as class to their homes. The West Brighton portico is tacked on to a house with which it has no organic relationship. It is meant to put us in mind of the colonnaded porticos of magnificent Southern plantations remembered from “Gone With the Wind” and, beyond them, the classical buildings of Rome and Greece.

The portico is absurd and endearing, a marker of the aspirations of the people who will pay the mortgage for the next 30 years. Ms. Osinski does not score points on its pretensions: The picture is straightforward, and we are concerned for the safety of the man working so close to the edge of the roof. But a lot is implied about those who will inhabit the house, coming and going through the front door sheltered by this portico.

“Near the Staten Island Mall” is also about real estate: One in a parade of identical row houses has a for-sale sign hung out front.Next to it is a house with an Oldsmobile squeezed into a sharply pitched driveway. In “Green Tree Estates,” a billboard at the intersection of Victory Boulevard and Morani Street offers “1 family homes / 2 & 3 bedrooms / from $64,000.” The homes in “New Town Houses” are comically compressed to fit their lots: A cyclone fence and a car on jacks with its wheels off are markers of class. Like all the pictures these are black and white, either 16 inches by 20 inches or 16 inches square. The prints, made with carbonbased inks on Hahnemuhle paper, are very detailed, but have a bit too much snap for my taste.

Cars are also an important presence in Ms. Osinski’s West Brighton. In “Two Boys With Automobile,” young boys pose with the car as an embodiment of power, and in “Two Girls With Automobile,” teenage girls pose with the car as a symbol of status.

“Wrecked Cars” recalls Walker Evans’s classic “Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania” (1936), except there are tract houses in the hazy distance of Ms. Osinski’s picture. The auto-related businesses in “Near the Bayonne Bridge” include Artie’s Paint & Auto Body, Gem Transmissions, and Ziebart’s Auto-truck Rustproofing, the motto of which is “It’s us – or rust.”

The people Ms. Osinski encountered on her walks around West Brighton and in her forays to the emporia are closely observed, but with great respect. Though her essays on Staten Island in many ways resemble Bill Owens’s record of his suburban community in Livermore, Calif., she never sneers at her neighbors.

The subjects of “Two Teenage Girls” look Italian, and the one on the left has a strikingly Mediterranean face. They wear outfits that are identical except for their color – blouses with epaulets, and short pants with material that ties at the waist – and chain necklaces with their names and initials on tags. Their hair is done into constructions of great ethnic and class specificity. They stand patiently in the sun before Ms. Osinski ‘s camera, and the photographer does not mock them.

The picture of a woman pushing an electric lawn mower in “Naughton Avenue” is somewhat comic, but Ms. Osinski does not ridicule her. It is clear that on Naughton Avenue, with its wood frame houses and front yards, the lawn must be mowed, and someone has to do it. The pretty, but not too pretty, teenager in jeans and a T-shirt in “Girl With Paper Bag” stands in front of a white picket fence and latticed entranceway holding the groceries she dutifully bought at the store.The “Preteen” stopped on the sidewalk before a row of hedges lacks the fashion sense girls her age in the other boroughs might have, but she will get where she’s going.

Parents with children figure prominently in the “Staten Island Shoppers” series. In “Staten Island Shoppers #8” (1994), we see the trunk of a father’s Tshirt, his white walking shorts, and his legs to just below the knees; all we see of the child is two legs dangling against the father’s chest. In the background is a parking lot.This is a picture that succeeds by withholding all but the most essential information.

Until July 30 (1 Freeman Alley, between Bowery and Chrystie Street, 212-505-9156).