Diane Arbus
The Met Breuer
In one of those hard-to-believe-now anecdotes, Diane Arbus had trouble selling an editioned portfolio of her photographs in 1971; Richard Avedon bought two of the four she managed to sell for $1,000 each. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s elegant exhibition of Arbus’s early, mostly unseen work, “In the Beginning,” curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim at the Met Breuer, includes the contents of one of Avedon’s boxes in a side room: a well-trafficked coda to the show’s new discoveries. This is Arbus at the (all-too-soon) end (she would die just a few months later at forty-eight), and demonstrates the arresting intensity of her iconic work: crisp images shot with a medium-format camera of a boy at a pro-war parade wearing a BOMB HANOI pin; a giant towering over his parents in their house; an unpopulated suburban living room with a Christmas tree squished in its corner, dripping tinsel.
Far less known, and for the most part never before seen, are the photographs that Arbus took in the 1950s and early ’60s. Primarily shot with a 35-mm camera, and just as she was leaving behind the commercial fashion career she had established with her husband, Allan—and her marriage—these dozens of images make up the fascinating “In the Beginning.” We witness Arbus’s coming-into-herself, spurred by a behind-the-scenes visit to the circus in 1953, where she met the little person Andy Ratoucheff, who would emerge as one of her muses. Her curiosity—to explore every corner of the city and to connect with people whose profession, identity, physicality, sexuality, or age teetered on its social edges and extremes—led her to movie theaters, sideshows, freak shows, morgues, and parks. These works prove Arbus to be a greater street photographer than we’ve previously understood (though John Szarkowski’s inclusion of Arbus alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in his “New Documents” exhibition of 1967 hinted at her achievement in this regard).
The emotional intensity of Arbus’s subjects jars us from any complacent viewing: In the warmly lit Barbershop interior through a glass door, N.Y.C. 1957, a man looks up from shaving another to stare outside at the camera. You realize that he’s been distracted from his job and holds a blade above the closed eyes of his client, whose square jaw conjures images of Frankenstein’s monster. I would never have guessed the minimalist, sun-bleached seascape Old Woman with hands raised in the ocean, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960 was by Arbus (it channels one of her most influential teachers, the photographer Lisette Model). But one giveaway is that despite the placid surface of the water, there’s something unnerving about the lone figure in it. From our (and thus Arbus’s) vantage point, it’s hard to tell if she gestures in greeting, baptismal ecstasy, or distress.
Passive looking is further upended by the exhibition’s installation. Each photograph is hung on an individual, thin plinth, organized in alternating rows so that, on arriving into the single darkened gallery where all the early works hang, you feel as if you’re entering a deep forest of images. This design has a practical function, too. In allowing each photograph to breathe, it allows the spectator to breathe more freely, and to pivot in any direction.
Different patterns emerge from such looking, but a dominant focus in these early works concerns the idea of building some kind of reality by masking another, evident, for example, in images of “female impersonators” midway through their transformations in their dressing rooms, or Five members of The Monster Fan Club, N.Y.C. 1961, in which a group of boys wearing grotesque masks sit on the steps of a row house with their arms draped around each other. Their camaraderie, cuffed jeans, and posturing make the image endearing, their faces almost friendly. Sometimes this projection is more literal, as in an almost romantic photograph of a drive-in-movie screen that seems to have swapped its imagery with the sky around it: The screen shows a cloudy moonscape, while the night itself is black, illuminated only by a few streetlights. Another rare photo without figures, Rocks on wheels, Disneyland, Cal. 1962, takes this motif further, exposing the comedy but also the beauty of an artificial landscape. It’s an image at once waiting in the wings and already fully formed, astonishing.