“Diane Arbus: in the beginning,” the darkly mesmerizing show currently on view at the Met Breuer outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together a selection of so-called early photographs. Most of them have not been publicly exhibited before and, taken as a whole, they seem likely to confirm and even enhance Arbus’s reputation as one of America’s most original and audacious artists. Her career was distressingly short. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48. This month marks an unhappy anniversary.
Arbus’s death cast a shadow across her work and gave rise to her public image as the Sylvia Plath of photography, a depressed, sometimes desperate female artist adrift in a callous world. But the Met shows gives us a different Arbus, a geniusy, all-seeing photographer who knew exactly what she was doing and determined to challenge the conformist tenor of the 1950s. The exhibition starts in 1956 – the Eisenhower era, the heyday of Normal, when Americans believed they were supposed to aspire to the same, one-size-fits-all set of ideals.
Even in her earliest photographs, Arbus was fascinated by what we now call the world of extreme difference. She celebrated difference before we had a humane vocabulary for it, before the architects of political correctness taught us to bestow respect on people of all backgrounds and races and genders. Today, we no longer refer to midgets and transsexuals as freaks or weirdos, as was the custom in Arbus’s time. Rather, we speak of people affected by a spectrum of physical or psychological difference.
Starting in 1956, when she abandoned a decade-long career in advertising, Arbus trained her lens on dwarfs and giants and transgender men and female strippers in tacky nightclubs. My favorite photograph here shows a sullen schoolgirl standing on the curb on a winter day, awaiting a bus, her pointy hood saddling her with a foolish profile she never requested. Although Arbus supposedly found her subjects on the streets of New York, I wouldn’t call her a street photographer. She wasn’t interested in capturing the proverbial fleeting moment. Rather, she captures the moments that never end, the imperfect bodies that we are born into and which hold us captive, for better and worse, until death do us part.
The show’s installation is frustratingly eccentric. Each of the 100-odd photographs is hung on its own freestanding wall, and the walls fill the second floor of the Met Breuer like so many trees in a labyrinthine forest. Chronology – the attempt to track an artist’s development – is tossed to the winds.
Nonetheless, nothing can dilute the primal power of Arbus’s work – which, by the way, seems less driven by impulsive emotion than a conscious love of the constructed rewards of symmetry and full-frontal geometry.
Consider, for instance, “Lady on a bus, N.Y.C.,” from 1957, in which a middle-aged matron bundled in a fur coat stares out from one of the back rows of a city bus, oblivious to the young male passenger seated behind her. Above their heads, a partially visible advertisement offers a picture of happy motherhood – as if to contrast the idealized past with the harsh present. You can safely assume that nothing in an Arbus photograph is there by accident.
