From its first words, “Picture this,” Rebecca Zurier’s important new book offers readers vivid visual and intellectual insights into both Ashcan School images and the modern culture of urban New York in which they developed. Beginning with a lively evocation of the details in John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window (1907), Zurier analyzes the rapidly developing processes of representation, display, and active looking that shaped the city’s changing cultural milieu from the late nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth. What did it mean, she asks, to live in a culture of newly exciting visual spectacle provided by street advertising, printed media, cinema, and the fashionable, awkward, or eccentric self-representation of New York’s throngs of inhabitants, who both absorbed and contributed to the vitality of this increasingly scopophilic culture? How was this culture of images further shaped by working-class women and men of varied ethnic groups who claimed a new presence as American citizens, articulated through visually coded signs of identity? Zurier links these developments to Ashcan School works through their shared engagement in representational practices that she labels the “city on paper,” a visual record developed through multivalent forms of representation. This changing body of modern urban imagery formed...