There is a major retrospective of the work New York photographer Diane Arbus, the biggest in 30 years, on at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An excerpt from the NYT review of the show:

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.

Michael Kimmelman, the writer of the NYT article, also has an audio commentary available, but you'll have to launch it from the story.