As skylines rose and millions of Americans moved to cities in the early 20th century, photographers found new ways to capture the scale and speed of metropolitan life. “Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography” follows that parallel history across more than 100 works by 38 photographers, among them Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Saul Leiter, Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava, and Bruce Davidson. The exhibition moves from the optimism of industrial expansion and the rise of the Empire State Building to Depression-era breadlines, the cultural shifts of the postwar decades, and the neon-lit streets and graffiti-covered subway cars of 1980s New York. Skyscrapers and street life appear alongside images of labor, migration, and poverty. The beauty of this exhibition is that it doesn’t offer a single portrait of urban America. It holds dozens in view at once, offering a record of how the modern city and modern photography evolved together and showing a diversity of people and perspective that made both worth capturing. —Clara Scholl