Diane Arbus always had a way with people. As a child she was so precocious, curious, and observant that she intimidated her own mother. As a teenager, she excelled in school with a mind so fine that an art teacher called her “an original.” As a young woman, she knew how to both seduce and submit to men in order to get what she wanted: attention, affection. Many who met her found her utterly fascinating, and she in turn was fascinated by the lives of others. “I love secrets, and I can find out anything,” she once said. And in many ways, she did.
Arbus was a titan of twentieth-century American photography, albeit an understated one, who in her too-brief career helped to crack open the world for closer inspection. (She died by her own hand in 1971 at the age of 48.) Like her predecessors and peers — Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott, Gary Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name a few — she preferred the streets to the studio, documenting the world as it passed before her. Unlike some of them, she wasn’t interested in capturing her subjects anonymously, or on the sly. She wanted to connect with them, to know them, and to produce images possessed of something essential, something real about them. “diane arbus: in the beginning” is an extraordinary exhibition of the artist’s earliest photographs, taken as she was just going out into the world to come into her own.