Imagine two people walking down a New York City sidewalk, and at the end of the block being stopped and asked what they had seen. Would they have noticed the same things? Would they describe them the same way? Now imagine that the two people are Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt, both certified New York “street photographers,” and what they are asked for is the pictures they took. Laurence Miller had something like that in mind when he organized “Diane Arbus-Helen Levitt: A Conversation,” the exhibition currently occupying his gallery.

Ms. Levitt was born into working-class Brooklyn in 1913, and now lives quietly in Greenwich Village. Arbus was born to the wealth and privilege of Central Park West in Manhattan in1923, and died by her own hand in 1971. They had some acquaintance of each other — Ms. Levitt wrote a letter of recommendation in support of Arbus’s 1962 Guggenheim Fellowship application — but they are enormously disparate personalities, and equally disparate photographers.

The first two pictures are Ms. Levitt’s “Harlem Angel, New York City” (1940) and Arbus’s “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central park, N.Y.C.” (1962), both pictures of little boys holding play weapons. The boys are about 8, but the former is black and, although neatly dressed, apparently poor, while the second is white, blond, and middle class. The black boy holds a wooden or plastic pistol to his chest with both hands, but the look on his face is totally benign; he seems either unaware that he is holding a gun or somewhat puzzled by it. The white boy glares at the camera with rigid ferocity, his empty left hand formed into a claw even as the suspender strap on that side of his short pants slides off his shoulder.

The contact sheet of the roll of film from which Arbus got her picture (not on display here) shows she took many shots of this boy and selected the one in which he looked the most freakish. Parents of little boys know it is virtually impossible to keep them from playing with toy weapons, even that it is healthy that they do so, but Arbus presents this boy as a study in pathology: The picture makes clear he will grow up to become either a serial killer or a Republican. People who are indignant about boys playing with GI Joe action figures will find their worst fears boded forth, but others may feel that this boy, with his pathetically spindly legs, has been taken advantage of for some unspecified agenda.

Similarly, some may find Ms. Levitt’s “Harlem Angel” a bit cloying, her secular humanism shaded by the leftist politics of the time. But others will see a sweet child confused by portents of violence.

Arbus’s “Boy with a strawhat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C.” (1967) is paired with Ms. Levitt’s “New York City (boys playing foreign legion)” (c.1939). The distinctive headgear is the link. The two images show a major difference in the artists’ techniques. Ms. Levitt always used natural light; Arbus came to use flash, even when shooting outdoors. Her picture is exposed for the intensely lit boy with the straw hat, so the rusticated wall of the building behind him is much darker. The illuminated boy is isolated, alone with the symbols of his jejune patriotism, his geeky bowtie and straw hat, a figure held up for derision.

The point of Ms. Levitt’s “New York City (leaning couple)” (c. 1940) is the happenstance that both figures are canted to the left at the same angle. This working-class couple sit in chairs they have brought to the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, both looking with the same expression at something outside the frame. The picture is affectionately humorous.

By contrast, the point of Arbus’s “The King and Queen of a Senior Citizen’s Dance, N.Y.C.” (1970) is how pathetic this middle-class couple is in their bogus royalty. They sit on ersatz thrones wearing costume-store robes and tinsel crowns while the harsh light exposes their affectless faces. There is psychology here and also sociology, and a powerful imputation that their highnesses are existentially damned.

Helen Levitt is a peripatetic humanist. Diane Arbus has an edge. Ms. Levitt is as anonymous in her work as she has been private in her life. The devils that tormented Arbus are everywhere in her photography. Ms. Levitt’s pictures seem artless, as if taking pictures came as naturally to her as moseying along the sidewalk. Arbus’s pictures are more sophisticated, worked at, their artificiality an effort to get at something deeper, something not on the surface. The gallery manager at Miller, Jody Berman, told me that visitors to the show tend to be highly partisan, sometimes offended that their favorite is even on the same wall as the other photographer.

Discussing the difference between style and vision, the critic Vicki Goldberg wrote, “Style defends largely on surface components such as composition and contrast, on aesthetics, on a consistent eye, sometimes on gimmicks. Vision probably draws as much from the life as from the eye, from the heart as well as the brain, from the complexities of personality more than from ingenuity or mastery of craft.” Although Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus are both New York women, it is two very different New Yorks, and they are two very different women.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until March 10 (20 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-397-3930).