PATRICIA STOKES: Here’s why I agreed to live with Lilly: when I told her I wanted to be an artist, she asked what kind. Back in Wilmington, “artist” always put an end to the conversation. What kind? Now I must really be in New York! I found a waitressing job at a place on Madison that served Continental food on good china, hailing distance from some of the art galleries. I was convinced it would take only one regular customer, a wealthy collector intrigued by the terribly attractive waitress who made cryptic references to her work while serving his beef Bourguignon. As you might infer, I was eighteen and not awfully original. Anyhow the shift manager and I got along just fine so when one of the waitresses quit I told him I had a friend. Lilly wasn’t experienced, but she was keen to learn. In an abundance of rookie enthusiasm she twisted a corkscrew into a cork without first removing the foil, but as soon as the boss could trust her with a bottle of Bordeaux he started offering her dinner shifts on my nights off. Get this: instead of taking the work like any self-respecting kid desperate to make rent, Lilly told him she’d signed up for evening photography classes starting that fall so he should probably find another girl. Well, that just impressed the hell out of me. It must have impressed our boss, too, because he told Lilly she could work as many dinners as she liked, and he’d schedule her however she needed come September.

5. Bullfrog (boy selling newspapers), New York, 1953

Kids don’t show up much in my mother’s work until I come along, which—face it—wouldn’t have happened if she had been more worldly or if the Pill had appeared in 1954 instead of 1960. But being unplanned isn’t the same as being unwanted. For example, the boy in this picture was unplanned. Lillian hadn’t set out to photograph a child on that particular day. Still, it’s easy to tell that as soon as Lillian saw this kid, she fell in love with everything from the angle of his cap, to the tiny snubbed nose above his gigantic open mouth, to the pieces of broken glass glittering at the bottom edge of the frame.

PATRICIA STOKES: Lilly put the kibosh on a few apartments that had seemed perfectly nice to me. I was beginning to worry that I’d need to find someone less particular if I wanted to escape the Suzy Parkers of Katharine House when Lilly finally found something she liked. The place didn’t seem any worse than the ones she had nixed, plus it was only a few blocks from the Village, so I liked it fine enough.