But, oh lord, that apartment. The front door opened directly onto the kitchen, with three more rooms lined up one behind the other, railroad-style, all for forty dollars a month—which was decent even back then, but not for no reason. We were on the second floor, right above a grocery. Between the storefront and everything happening outside, it could be hard to conduct a civilized conversation. Trucks rattled past at terrible hours with deliveries for the meatpacking plants. Every morning, before you could properly even call it that, something I called The Monster started hawking newspapers. I stuffed cotton in my ears, but Lilly used The Monster as her personal rooster to log camera time before her lunch shift uptown.

When she showed me this photo, I thought she was pulling my leg. I’d assumed some burly lumberjack was making all the racket. That boy’s talents were seriously underused: he could have been mounted to a police car during a riot or strapped to a lighthouse on a foggy night and done some real public good. I told Lilly she should hang it on the wall between the kitchen windows so that when we were being serenaded, we’d have the face that went with it, to make the mornings a little easier to bear.

LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JULY 1953: It’s so challenging to photograph people in a candid way. You can’t waste any time thinking, you have to take the picture already knowing exactly what to do. Sometimes I manage it, but most of the time I’m still puzzling things out. I’ll be considering composition or light or timing, which inevitably shows up in the print as a kind of distance that reminds anyone who’s looking at it they’re looking at a photograph. I don’t want to make photographs. The way you described it with Capa’s work is exactly right: I want to make windows.

6. Getting ready (Patty), New York, 1953

7. Makeup artist on the uptown train, New York, 1953

At this point Lillian had taken so many shots of Patricia that by the time she got on the same train as this woman applying eye shadow, I bet she snapped the shutter without knowing why. To hear Lillian describe it, when she was “locked in,” she didn’t tell her finger to press the shutter any more than she told her heart to pump blood.

Point being, nothing about the uptown eye-shadow woman calls Lillian’s roommate to mind, since the woman in the photo is rounder and shorter and about fifteen years older. But side by side, Makeup Artist and Patricia are twins—or at least cousins, with the same raised brows and parted lips as they put their faces on.