Full Exposure

Female impersonators, midgets, hermaphrodites, tattooed (all over) men, an albino sword swallower, a human pincushion, a Jewish giant: “Characters in a Fairy Tale for Grown Ups” is the way Diane Arbus once described her subjects—“people who appear like metaphors somewhere further out than we do,” she also said, “invented by belief.” Yet Arbus could produce the same sense of dire enchantment in photographs of the most ordinary people: Fifth Avenue matrons, Coney Island bathers, even children. Other photographers focussed on the passing human comedy, but obliquely, snapping shots with a concealed camera, on the sly. Arbus started out that way, too, but soon changed tactics. She needed to get closer, physically and emotionally. So she asked permission, got to know people, listened to their stories; some relationships went on for years. The distinctive power of her classic photographs is in this deep engagement, in her subjects’ frank exposure and our implied complicity. If you want to look, they seem to say—and who doesn’t want to look?—then have the courage to look me in the eye.