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It features historic moments from the civil rights movement to Aids activism, and includes works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus, Ai Weiwei and others.

“The anonymous artist seems to have intuitively understood,” writes the art historian James Meyer, referring to the painting in his 2022 essay “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900,” “some four and a half centuries before Seydou Keïta and Diane Arbus trained their cameras on twins in matching dress that a resemblance so extreme incites a perception of unlikeness, of difference, discernible in the subtle variations in the young women’s expressions, the shapes of their noses and eyelids, the divergent hues of their eyes.”

The museum said Tuesday that the exhibition, titled “Fragile Beauty,” will include 300 images by more than 140 photographers, including Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston, Zanele Muholi and Ai Weiwei.

The worst instance of this approach — given its own room in the exhibition — is his project of 1979-84, “In the American West,” an ill-advised attempt to rival the achievement of his friend, Diane Arbus, who died in 1971.

But in choosing to portray in unforgiving detail an array of Westerners living on the margins and staring at the camera — oil field workers, drifters, a rattlesnake skinner — Avedon imitated Arbus’s style but could not replicate her probing psychological intelligence.