No one ever said being an artist was easy. Ronnie Farley has “done all kinds of weird things” to make ends meet, including working as a bike messenger, a bartender at CBGB’s, and a housecleaner, all to avoid what she calls the “spirit-killing” tedium of a nine-to-five existence.

Chucking the tedium, along with health insurance and a steady paycheck, forced Ms. Farley, 45, to live on the ragged edges of New York, “the best city in the country – maybe the world,” she said. She lived in the Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen during the 1980s and ’90s, “when it was really hell.” Putting up with the ills that go along with gritty urban neighborhoods may not have been comfortable, but it did produce an intimate book of photographs. Her portraits and urban landscapes capture the essence of those neighborhoods and the people who populate them.

“New York is fertile. It’s the place to be to experience the world,” she said. “You never have to leave town, because the world’s at your fingertips.”

The New York that Ms. Farley chronicles in “Diary of a Pedestrian” spans an extraordinarily violent, passionate, and creative time in the city’s history: 1979-99. It was a different era, a time when neon lights from sex shops glared across Times Square, when it was still possible to see crack pipes on the sidewalk during one’s morning commute.

Ms. Farley’s photo memoir, a stark collection of black-and-white images, easily blends a documentation of “the edge” of that bittersweet era and the essence of a diary, a voyeuristic peep into someone else’s life.

Paging through “Diary of a Pedestrian” is like scanning a stranger’s little black book: There are glimpses of auspicious, straight-forward appointments, but primarily it’s a narrative of impenetrable, mysterious, and slightly tawdry trysts.

A picture of two women sitting in a room in Hell’s Kitchen in 1984 falls into the latter category. The two smirking women are sitting on the edge of a disorderly bed. The walls of the cell-like room are plastered like a junior-high girl’s locker with a slipshod collage of photos of Keith Richards, Marilyn Monroe, and scantily clad models. It’s as if the women are playing dress-up for a life they will never be able to lead.

Ms. Farley explained that one of the women (Carole) is actually a transvestite, and is living in the one room in Hell’s Kitchen (one bathroom to a floor) to save money for an official sex change. (Only later, on the day she finally has saved enough and is moving out of her questionable digs, her boyfriend drives away in the U-Haul she rented with all of her possessions and the cash she was going to use for the operation).

Ms. Farley said, over coffee at the Skylight Diner in the newly gentrified Hell’s Kitchen, that she’s lost touch with most of the subjects in her book. The admission fits with her ephemeral vision of life in the city.

Another photo depicts a patron “dancing” at CBGB’s Hardcore Matinee circa 1983.The man’s visible hand punches the air with fury, his head is lowered like bull’s before a charge, and his chain-ensconced shoe is posed midair, about to thunder down on the scarred stage while other patrons calmly look on with expressions ranging from mild distaste to bewilderment. Another guest is inexplicably posed on all fours in the lower left-hand area of the shot. Again, as with all of Ms. Farley’s enigmatic and often humorous shots, the observer gathers the subjects have many, possibly nefarious, tales to tell.

Ms. Farley documents not only the people of New York, but also the alleys, boarded-up tenements on the Lower East Side “back when it was still cool,” dank schoolyards scrawled with graffiti, the beautiful iron monstrosity of construction sites, and, of course, the city’s iron horse – the subway.

Throughout the period archived in “Diary of a Pedestrian,” Ms. Farley freelanced for the Associated Press as a stringer, a photo editor, and most significantly for her, an archivist for its vast photo library. She also had two other books published: “Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimonies of Native American Women” and “Cowgirls: Contemporary Portraits of the American West.”

Working at the AP’s photo library, Ms. Farley garnered a profound respect for the news photographers of the 1930s and ’50s, and “Diary of a Pedestrian” reflects the gritty realism of mid-20th-century photography.

“You had to have intuition then. You had to be skilled and just work on that intuition,” Ms. Farley said. While she respects the options technology affords modern photographers, she believes that it can impede on the personal, instinctive relationship the photographer should have with his or her subject.

The savage wildness evoked in “Diary of a Pedestrian” makes the viewer miss the pre-Giuliani New York just like a screening of “The Wild Bunch” almost makes you miss the Wild West. Until one meditates on the gun-shot wounds and the failing education system that go along with it.