“… I remember one summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park. It must have been about 1966. The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough amazingly hard-core lesbians. And in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies.
“It was really remarkable. And I found it very scary… There were days I just couldn’t work there and then there were days I could…. I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot… I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them.” — Diane Arbus
DIANE ARBUS: IN THE PARK—at Lévy Gorvy in Manhattan—is the first exhibition to focus solely on Arbus’ photographs made in Central Park and Washington Square, theaters of public interaction that provided fertile territory for the creation of many of her most striking and original images. All of the works on view were made within four miles of where they are now exhibited.*
“A large part of the mystery of Arbus’s photographs lies in what they suggest about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed. Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that?” — Susan Sontag
DIANE ARBUS: IN THE PARK, through June 24
LÉVY GORVY, 909 Madison Avenue at East 73rd Street, New York City
Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag and her son on bench, N.Y.C., 1965. Copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
Susan Sontag and her son on bench, N.Y.C., 1965.
Photograph by Diane Arbus
Copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus: In the Park, Lévy Gorvy