How do images shape the way we experience a city? On September 30, 2026, The Block Museum of Art welcomed art historian Greg Foster-Rice for the exhibition keynote for Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Prints and Photographs from The Block’s Collection. Drawing on works in the exhibition, Foster-Rice explored how artists capture urban life and influence how we understand its possibilities.

Foster-Rice, Professor of the History of Photography at Columbia College Chicago and a Northwestern alumnus, brought a perspective informed by his work co-curating The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980. His keynote took its starting point from urban historian Lewis Mumford’s observation that “the city creates the theater and is the theater.” Through this lens, buildings, streets, and storefronts become a stage, while the people who inhabit them give the city its action and meaning.

Looking closely at prints, photographs, and film, Foster-Rice traced how artists convey the city’s scale, movement, and sensory intensity. Skyscrapers photographed from below, reflections layered in shop windows, and lights shimmering on wet pavement reveal an environment that continually changes how people see and are seen. Works by Henry Simon, Allan Freelon, Clare Romano, and others offered different approaches to translating these experiences into images.

The talk also examined who occupies the urban stage and how artists represent encounters among strangers. In photographs by Vivian Maier and Bev Grant, gestures, glances, and public gatherings open questions about gender, power, and belonging. Foster-Rice emphasized that images can also participate in the life they depict: photographs of demonstrations amplify demands for change, while pictures made within communities can strengthen recognition and connection.

“Picturing the Modern Metropolis asks us to consider how images of the city shape our experience of cities, raising the potential for a dramatic rewriting of the script. Cities and the commingling of strangers from different races, genders, sexualities, and classes have the greatest potential to be our engines for democracy if only we can continue to engage with them and don’t give up hope on the urban experiment.” – Greg Foster-Rice

Bringing these themes into the present through the work of photographers Bob Thall and Kenn Cook Jr., Foster-Rice considered how images can challenge assumptions about neighborhoods and the people who live in them. Audience questions extended the discussion to nighttime imagery, the histories preserved in anonymous snapshots, and the changing experience of public visibility in the age of social media.

Throughout the talk, Foster-Rice encouraged close attention to images as a way to deepen awareness of the city itself. The exhibition offers an opportunity to practice that attention, both in the galleries and in the streets beyond them.