Diane Arbus: In the Park

Lévy Gorvy gallery on Madison Avenue has mounted a wonderful exhibit titled "Diane Arbus: In the Park." According to their website, "the exhibition will be the first 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 will now be exhibited." If you like Arbus, this show is not to be missed. For me, it combined brilliant, unfamiliar images with "greatest hits" like "Child with a Toy Grenade" and "Lillian and Dorothy Gish in Central Park."

This quote was displayed in the stairwell:

... 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.” - DA

www.levygorvy.com