I would have chosen somewhere less vocational than the New England School of Photography, which was geared toward commercial shooters, except I enrolled late and it was the only school with open slots I could find. We were to bring a processed roll of something we shot to our first class, where we got a crash course in color printing.

That was how I first got to know the other students, when their prints came out of the photo processor, a giant machine that emitted a steady hum and smelled sweetly of chemicals, like the printing presses I’d been around as a kid. I’d taken pictures of my inline skating club and started on a print of a guy who knelt awkwardly as he posed for me with his rollerblades on. I saw images of a mountain landscape, a bank lobby interior, a street performer, the kinds of photographs I expected. Except there was one print that kept catching my eye as it went through various versions, lighter and darker, redder and pinker. It was of two bald mannequin heads against a red background, with blank eyes that gave me the uncanny feeling they were decapitated. I leaned closer while another print of the image came out of the processor, and I noticed that the skin on those heads was crinkled, not like the smooth plastic I expected.

“I make them out of papier-mâché,” a girl said as she pulled the print out of the machine. Her hair was a vibrant red that verged on artificial, cut in a bob with bangs straight across her forehead, which might have felt severe except for the large eyes and plump face that made her look like a more childlike, happier version of the dolls she created.

After the instructor evaluated our photographs at the next class, he gave us a ten-minute summary of his life, from his Ohio upbringing to his marriage to a woman who wanted to return to her home city of Boston, which was how he had ended up working as a portrait photographer and teaching at the school the past twenty years. When it was the red-haired girl’s turn, she introduced herself as Lenora Mayer, a painter who had graduated from RISD the previous year and had since gotten more interested in photography because of how it rode that fine line between make-believe and reality. She grew up with hippie artist parents, her father a gentile and her mother a Jew, a culture that she deeply identified with, in Minneapolis of all places. She now lived in an artist loft in South Boston, a former shoe factory that was falling apart.