A teenager in a straw boater, with big apricot-shaped ears, thin lips and matching bow tie, gazes out from the photograph, whose date is 1967. He is standing beside, and perhaps he's holding (his hands are out of the frame, so it's hard to tell) an American flag. He wears a bowtie-shaped flag pin, too, with buttons affixed on each lapel. "Bomb Hanoi," one says.
Presumably the audience Diane Arbus imagined for this picture would have regarded the boy, if not as another of her "freaks," then as somebody different from them. Arbus once said that she wanted to photograph "evil," about which her daughter, Doon, ventured that what Arbus really meant was that she wanted to photograph what was "forbidden." "She was determined," Doon Arbus explained, "to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on." Or you might say she wanted to find the humanity in people that others shunned.
A contrarian, Arbus could do the opposite -- she could revel in flaws in the admired and celebrated. But this boy's gentle, open face, his obvious vulnerability, convey the tenderness and bittersweet melancholy that are Arbus's finest modes of expression, the emotions that reveal themselves after her best pictures leave their first impression, which is often alarm, distrust or unease.
"Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way, but they come out looking another way, and that's what people observe," she wrote. "You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw." While spotting the flaws, much of the time Arbus transformed them into gifts.
Her powerful and moving retrospective, the first full-dress overview in more than three decades and, with the cooperation of the Arbus estate, the most extensive ever organized, has finally arrived at the Metropolitan Museum. It opened more than a year ago at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, trailing in its wake the expected arguments about her work. Last year a separate exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery proffered some of Arbus's commercial work, for Esquire magazine; it included a cache of previously unseen pictures she shot for an affluent Upper East Side family on commission. Tendentious but instructive, that comparatively smallish event revealed what Arbus did when she didn't have her heart in her work. Arbus without heart was heartless.
By contrast, this retrospective proves that her memorable work, which she did, on the whole, not for hire but for herself, was all about heart -- a ferocious, audacious heart. It transformed the art of photography (Arbus is everywhere, for better and worse, in the work of artists today who make photographs), and it lent a fresh dignity to the forgotten and neglected people in whom she invested so much of herself. In the process, she captured a moment, the anxious 1950's and 60's, and -- this probably applies as much to Arbus as to any other photographer of the second half of the last century -- she captured New York.