Tanyth Berkeley, “Grace (Standing),” 2006, C–print.

The women in Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits—most are strangers she’s met in passing on the subway or on the streets of New York—all have strikingly eccentric looks. Gathered together on a gallery wall, with their plump cheeks, outsized noses, misaligned eyes or white-on-white coloring, they might be an exotic urban tribe among whom Berkeley has discovered an unexpected allure. Without polemics, she persuades us once again that beauty’s where you find it.

Berkeley, 38, who was born in Hollywood, California, made many of these portraits while working toward her MFA in photography at Columbia. Following an increasingly typical trajectory, she graduated in 2004 and was celebrating her debut show at the savvy young Bellwether gallery in New York seven months later.

Her latest work, shown at Bellwether early this spring and slated for inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual “New Photography” roundup this fall, includes a series of nearly life-sized full-length portraits of men and women that suggest a haunted fusion of Rineke Dijkstra and Francesca Woodman: formal rigor, uncanny glamour and the sense that you’re in the presence of something not of this world.