Lenora and her world were the opposite of Ralph’s world of academics and rich gay men, or the sterile, deliberate environment of my MIT lab. She was everything I was missing from my life, which blossomed when she started introducing me to her school friends and artist neighbors, who ended up being my friends too. Over time, Lenora and I started seeing each other multiple times a week, whether in the darkroom or her loft or the various openings and parties she invited me to. We were each other’s first post-college friends, and we adored each other in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways, how my logical and her emotional natures were complements, how we bonded through our ingrained eccentricities, she a gentile-passing Jew from the Midwest, me an Anglo-passing Asian from the Philippines, and how we were simply at a point in our lives when we each needed a best friend.

At the end of that spring class, and as I began to take my shift to photography more seriously, I decided to rent space in a photo studio a few blocks away from Lenora’s loft, clean and polished in contrast to her dilapidated digs, and even bought a professional lighting setup. I’d been taking pictures for work at MIT and wanted to experiment with the aesthetic of scientific photography for fine arts purposes. I did this one series where I spread various white substances—tapioca, yogurt, cottage cheese—onto plexiglass and photographed them with a macro lens, to explore different varieties of white, my first, awkwardly literal foray into conceptual art, the incredibly white photographer taking pictures of sour cream. The first set of prints didn’t look great, so I abandoned the concept, since I was the type of person who insisted on being precocious and didn’t stick with ideas for long if they didn’t work the first time.

Lenora, on the other hand, had no reservations about trying out version after version of the same idea, constructing elaborate backgrounds for the papier-mâché heads that she also kept remaking, photographing them from an inordinate array of angles, learning how to control the features of her camera as she went along. She started to spend more time in my studio to do her setups, because she could control the light better with my professional equipment, rather than the clip lights she used at home.

That was how Lenora met the other new friend in my life, a new graduate student from MIT named Richard Russell, who I’d met the previous August when he started out in my lab, and came over to my cubicle on his first day.

“I heard you’re the artist in the group,” he said.