Photographing the Life That Rockwell Depicted, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

© Curtis Publishing Company Kevin Rivoli caught the interplay of “Election Day,” above, in 1995 in a firehouse in Sennett, N.Y

According to the New York Times, with his allegiance to dewy-eyed innocence and earnest sentimentality, the illustrator Norman Rockwell has often been mocked for creating an America that never was and never will be.

But Kevin Rivoli, a photojournalist in upstate New York, will tell you that’s just not true. He knows because he’s documented it.

Mr. Rivoli has spent the past 15 years capturing timeless moments in contemporary America — the solemn christenings and squirmy first haircuts, the town meetings and patriotic parades, the youthful shenanigans and the mature reverence symbolized by elderly hands resting on a well-thumbed bible.

He calls his project “In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America,” and by autumn his photographs will have grown into a book, published by Prestel, and a traveling exhibition, overseen by International Arts and Artists, that juxtaposes Mr. Rivoli’s images with Rockwell’s.

The project has received the blessing of the Rockwell family; the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.; and Curtis Publishing, owners of The Saturday Evening Post, whose covers Rockwell illustrations adorned. Additionally, some scholars hope that Mr. Rivoli’s images will put the old criticism about Rockwell to rest once and for all.

“I cover a lot of small-town America,” said Mr. Rivoli, 47, a contract photographer with The Associated Press who occasionally does work for The New York Times. “I’m not a war photographer, I’m not in metropolitan America. I tend to look for connections between people.

“Rockwell did a lot of that in his artwork,” he said.

Mr. Rivoli connected with Rockwell 18 years ago when he and his future wife, Michele, visited the Rockwell Museum. There they learned of critics’ contentions that Rockwell’s images were trite and kitschy figments of their creator’s nostalgic imagination.

“Kevin immediately said, ‘He’s not creating an America that doesn’t exist,’” Ms. Rivoli, a former reporter, recalled. “‘Those moments do exist, and I have them on film.’”

Over time Mr. Rivoli collected more than 120 such images, mostly the result of spontaneous moments snapped during assignments in upstate New York. For example, a photo of altar boys at a 1996 wedding in Otisco recalls the “Choirboy” cover Rockwell drew for the Post in 1954.

“When I go into an assignment that could be boring, I try to look for the picture within the picture, the essence of Norman Rockwell,” he said. “I always think, ‘How would he paint this?’”

For a while the Rivolis owned a gallery near their home outside Auburn, in the Finger Lakes region. But they closed shop two and a half years ago to spend more time with their small twin sons.

“My concern was that Kevin wasn’t going to have a creative outlet for people to enjoy what he did,” Ms. Rivoli said. So she suggested that he compile his images into a book.