Because everyone else’s introductions seemed so honest, I started from the beginning when it was my turn, how I grew up in the Philippines then moved to California at fifteen, and went to Harvard after that. I even added that no, my parents weren’t missionaries or in the military. I was actually albino, which meant that I didn’t see that great, but I enjoyed the challenge of doing things I wasn’t supposed to, like rollerblading and taking pictures, sometimes even at the same time. Lenora turned around from a few rows away to watch me, and I could tell from the way she nodded and laughed that we were going to be friends.

We started working on enlargers next to each other and set ourselves apart as the two artists in the group with that overconfidence of young graduates from elite schools—cringeworthy in retrospect—in contrast to the other students, who were hobbyists or budding commercial photographers. That was when I became privy to Lenora’s process, the way she did so much by feel, while my head was full of numbers and procedures—the right f-stop to get optimal exposure, how many points of magenta to add so a subject’s skin looked natural.

“Don’t forget it’s art,” she often told me when I showed her a print that was technically perfect but refused to give off that magic feeling of something you wanted to look at for more than half a second. I found that so thrilling about her, how she always put feeling before thought. Sometimes her prints came out so underexposed they were practically white, but she presented them for critique anyway because she found them visually interesting. Or she intentionally printed the frame where the main subject was out of focus, just to see if it would look cool. This loose approach extended to the rest of her life, from the illegal loft she lived in, where the toilet was in the kitchen, to the very fact that she spent four years perfecting her painting technique, only to end up working in photography and papier-mâché.