LETTER TO DOROTHY PRESTON, OCTOBER 1953: Thank you for the money. It means so much that you would send it, and of course I will keep the secret of the flour bin. I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing any more than Father does, but please know that I would have been miserable doing anything else. It was Father who taught me that the kind of life worth living was one worth working for, even if this wasn’t what he had in mind.

For the time being I am still waitressing, though I know you and Father disapprove of that as well. The hours are more flexible than office work, and this allows more freedom for my pictures and my classes. Thanks to your flour bin, next semester I’ll be able to enroll in a workshop with the art director of a leading fashion magazine. While I’m enjoying my class with Cynthia Ravitt, it will be good to learn from someone new. Ravitt mostly lectures from her book, which I am already quite familiar with after my time in Camera Club.

Thank you also for the hat and gloves. I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of myself to send you, but I promise that I’m taking care of myself, and I will try to send a picture soon.

14. Self-portrait, New York, 1953

As you might guess, this is not the picture that Lillian sent her mother. The photos on the wall behind Lillian’s head would have been her favorites. They’d go downhill from there, ending with the ones she didn’t like pinned to the wall across from her bed. I saw her do this in every bedroom of every apartment we ever had. I asked once why she didn’t hang the best ones where she could wake up to them. She told me that she wanted to be reminded each morning of what she needed to work on, not what she already did well.

If you squint, you can see American leg, Bullfrog, Woman at the window, and Woman in curlers all here on the “best of” wall, but Reunion and Times Square recruit aren’t there, even though Lillian included them in Box Two. I doubt her opinion of them changed: I just think that in the fall of 1953, they reminded her of someone she was trying to forget.

And, yes, she’s naked. As I said before, Lillian was pretty literal. The same way an artist draws from naked models to get a handle on basic anatomy, I think Lillian’s portraits were a way for her to study what lay at the core of people—their bodies, but also their fears, hopes, disappointments—to prepare herself for spotting those things out in the world.