On Aug. 18, 1959, George Tice was a Navy photographer’s mate third class on the aircraft carrier Wasp when an explosion in a hangar bay rocked the ship in the Atlantic Ocean, about 250 miles from Norfolk, Va.

He rushed to the flight deck, camera in hand, and took pictures of sailors extinguishing a fire in a helicopter before they pushed it overboard. The Navy said the accident was caused when one helicopter engine “overspeeded” and exploded during testing, consuming it and two other helicopters in flames. Two men died and 21 were injured.

One of Mr. Tice’s dramatic pictures of the scene was syndicated by The Associated Press and ran on the front page of The New York Times. It was noticed by the renowned photographer Edward Steichen, then the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who asked the Navy for a print for its collection.

“I was 20 years old,” Mr. Tice told New Jersey Monthly in 2014. “I thought, I must be an artist.”

Broad recognition for his artistry — his work, most of it in black and white, would be compared to Walker Evans’s documentary photos and the urban realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings — would not come for a while. After being discharged from the Navy, Mr. Tice became a portrait photographer of children and families.

On the side, though, he had begun spending time in Paterson, N.J., a down-at-the-heels industrial city, where he found beauty in the prosaic: A barbershop with a man behind its window, waiting to snip. The Passaic Falls. A car for sale in a driveway. Rooftops.