“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them,” Diane Arbus is known to have said. Her transfixing images centered on people on the fringes of postwar society, with direct gazes that often challenge the viewer, and their perceptions of beauty, head-on. Many of her subjects were those experimenting with everything from makeup to hair to tattooing—experiments that fell well outside the mainstream definitions of beauty. And these pioneers of self-expression through grooming are well represented in a new show of her work at the Met Breuer, which focuses on never-before-seen photographs from the first seven years of her career, when Arbus was in her thirties and living in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s.
While Arbus is better known for her later photographs, her early works are just as revelatory; they regard people who didn’t fit the molds of the 1950s with quiet fascination. Her subjects carefully apprehend her as much as she apprehends them, as in a shot of a female impersonator with heavily lined eyelids and pancake makeup getting dressed, surprised yet poised to find the camera there. One observes the photographer beginning to discover the person behind a persona in portraits like that of a tattoo enthusiast who warmly stares into the camera; a stripper interrupted from applying her makeup at a vanity; and a woman in stark makeup walking the city streets, whose eyes and expression reveal she’s not as masked as she may think.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus also said. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Even today, at a moment when beauty subcultures from nail art to rainbow hair are fixtures of our social-media feeds, her work feels timeless for what it conceals and reveals, something far beneath the surface.