LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, JUNE 1953: I have met a nice girl at Katharine House, an aspiring painter called Patricia Stokes who has become my friend. I’ve even photographed her a few times! After we both find work, we are going to rent an apartment in the neighborhood. I don’t know whether I want to go back to working in an office, but there seem to be lots of other suitable opportunities for young women. While I know you and Mother have reservations about the New School, one advantage to their night classes is that I will be able to work and study at the same time. Has any mail arrived for me? I should be at this address for at least another two weeks, so please don’t hesitate to forward anything that may come.

Even though I wasn’t there (or anywhere) when Lillian took this one, I know exactly how she did it. Lillian was allergic to posed shots, so instead of posing the person, she’d pose the background and wait for someone (in this case, Patricia) to walk in. Lillian called it a spider shot. As far as I was concerned, a longer name would have been better, something full of similar syllables that would take hours to say. Whenever the weather was nice—which for Lillian was anything without rain or snow between 35 and 98 degrees—I spent some serious quality time on benches and stoops while she waited beside her camera for the right person to pass into her perfectly composed frame. My kindergarten teacher thought I was a genius for being able to read chapter books, but by then I’d spent several small lifetimes stuck in places with nothing better to do than try to parse a printed page as Lillian waited beside her web.

Mostly she didn’t know who that someone would be until they showed up, but in this case she must have known her roommate’s habits and staked out the street corner, waiting for Patricia to strut past the partly burned-out American Legion sign. Without the title’s parenthetical bit, this would be just an anonymous pair of cigarette pants, but the name makes those legs feel as personal as a face.

Patricia Stokes must have been a veritable emblem of exotic womanhood to Lillian, considering that it was eight more years before my mother owned a pair of pants. Not that she ever wore them outside the darkroom. After Lillian became the American poster child (or at least the poster child’s photographer) for immorality and perversion, some people actually accused her of dressing like a 1950s librarian to mock American decency. For that to be true, she’d have had to put actual thought into her wardrobe, which—going by the skirts and sweater sets—was something she’d stopped doing around age sixteen.