Curated by visiting scholar Deborah Willis from the Henry's permanent collection, Out [o]Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty is a big survey show covering over a century in the medium. “Beauty” is certainly a fraught, contentious term. It's constructed and arranged long before the model sees the lens. It's a received tradition, a product of culture all its biases (toward symmetry, smoothness, white skin, blonde hair, whatever). The Vogue-ready images of Cecil Beaton veer to the conventionally pretty, while Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Cindy Sherman later bent that notion to their own purposes. Then there's Warhol and his flash-lit Polaroid frames, his subjects sometimes startled at parties, often without time to fix their hair or makeup. Beauty is something you rehearse; it takes lots of time and training before that fraction of a second when the shutter opens. Later, printed on photographic paper, it become an object of study for future generations of artists to reject, embrace, and recast. Other photographers in the exhibit include André Kertész, Lee Friedlander, and even our own Edward S. Curtis. BRIAN MILLER
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