A new exhibition of work by Diane Arbus opened this week at Levy Gorvy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Diane Arbus: In the Park presents images made in Central Park and Washington Square Park from the time she began photographing for her own purposes until her life ended in 1971.

In Washington Square Park, not far from where she lived after separating from her husband and collaborator in their commercial work, she began to find her personal vision, one that unfolded along with the social, political and sexual liberation of the 1960s. In her journal she wrote,

“... 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.

Left: Blonde girl, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965. Photo: Diane Arbus/Copyright © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Right: Girl and boy, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965. Copyright The Estate of Diane Arbus

In a sense, her definition of the park’s social geography parallels an unusual radar she possessed that enabled her to identify a prospective subject for her lens: You see someone on the street and … what you notice … is the flaw. She referred to this as “the gap between intention and effect,” between “what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing.”

This was the genius that set the artist and her pictures apart from anything mainstream. Her unwavering confrontation with truth—a truth likely founded in her recognition of the human desire to “put on a good face”—and how falsely founded that desire was. The best of Arbus’s photographs reveal a truth of some kind. What’s left after what one isn’t is taken away is what one is.

Diane Arbus: In the Park continues through June 24 at Levy Gorvy, 909 Madison Avenue, NY, NY Info CV19.EX.PHOTO