There were only five people in my morning tour: a couple from Texas, a mother and daughter from Munich, and a cellist named Paul. He had beautiful hands. I noticed them when he touched his forehead. Everyone was feeling a little nervous, and we spent the first few minutes talking about the news in the hushed tones used in museums. When the group is small, I usually ask the visitors what they’re interested in and try to tailor the tour to their tastes. The man from Texas had a gold ring on his pinkie and said he was a big fan of Renoir. He pronounced it Rin-Waa, and his wife smiled in agreement.

Paul was interested in the museum’s photography collection, so I started off in the room with the Walker Evanses. I’ve always been struck by his photographs, their sparse and formal beauty. Here were these people caught in grim and hopeless lives, and he photographed them with the same precise detachment he would an old signboard. There’s something breathtaking about it, the lack of compassion in favor of cold clarity. There were a couple of photographs by Diane Arbus at the other end of the room, and I decided to show them to the group to give them a sense of the other end of the spectrum, someone who seemed to identify with her subjects on a terrifying level. Not only does Arbus seem to feel their unhappiness, I explained, but what’s more, they—the twins and the triplets, the misfit children, the odd couples, the tramps, the queens and freaks—seem to regard her with distraught looks, as if they recognize something darker and more haunting than their own lot. Sometimes, on a good day, that happens: as you talk, you find things you didn’t know you had to say.

I let the group look for a while in silence at the child clutching the toy grenade and the old woman in a wheelchair holding a witch’s mask over her face. I was a little worried about how the man from Texas would react, but I should have given him the benefit of the doubt because he ended up taking a big interest, going right up close and screwing up his face in concentration. Paul had drifted back over to the Walker Evanses. His hands made me think of delicate, impossible tasks. They made me think, I don’t know why, of a man on the flight that crashed into the icy Potomac, in whose pocket was found a picture of the woman he loved and a pair of laminated butterfly wings.