A hundred years ago, New York had clearly emerged as a city to behold, the centerpiece of American enterprise. Everywhere the metropolis insisted on its presence as a grandiose hub of trade, finance, and industry. How would photographers address this spectacle? Working with unweildy cameras, they expressed three contrasting attitudes toward New York: one offered a material inventory of streets and interiors; another evoked a poetic mood; and the third dedicated itself to the most vital issues of social justice. The Byron Company, a commercial studio that originally specialized in photographing stage productions, depicted a city in which all social sectors functioned within an effective mercantile order. New York comes across as a straightforward setting for material goods, sometimes attended by picturesque citizenry. For Alfred Stieglitz, together with Karl Struss and Alvin Langdon Coburn, the civic life and physical realities of the city remained insignificant, compared to its power as a symbol of technological progress. These men, influential members of the Photo-Secession group and advocates of photography as a high art, worked in a tonalist style called Pictorialism. In their view, Manhattan was a state of mind, and their work was a reverie on the American future. During his long career as a social activist, Lewis Hine decried the exploitation of workers by New York’s ruthless employers. He spoke out for photography as a medium for critical reportage, using the melancholy realism of his images to effect change. Hine’s work broached an issue, critical for later photographers of New York: What is the relation of industrial capitalism to American democratic values? Much of what followed in New York photography was a response to that question.