Just when I’d reached my limit, I came home from working the dinner shift and Lilly burst from the john like a kid on Christmas morning, holding out a photograph that was still wet. It took ten tries, she explained, but it was finally perfect. She’d made it for me.

I recognized the man straight off. I must have walked past that park bench one hundred times on my way to work, though in typical city fashion, I’d never paid the person sitting on it any more mind than a parking meter. It took Lilly’s photo to reveal him to me: the hands holding the book like a dance partner; the face gazing at that page like it’s the whole world; the half-smile that says he’s on the winning end of some grand secret.

I had seen plenty of Lilly’s photos by now, but this one tipped the balance. Back in Delaware, any slob who painted something that wasn’t a car or the side of a house was considered an artist, but living with Lilly was different. Not that I wasn’t getting a certain amount of praise for my paintings. My professors at the Art Students League said I had promise, and going by what was on some of the other easels, I could tell I was holding my own. But seeing The reader, I realized that nobody looking at my work was ever going to feel one crumb of what I felt looking at Lilly’s.

Perhaps this explains why, when she gave me the photograph, I didn’t exactly dance with thanksgiving. I suppose I must have known she meant it as a sort of peace offering—to apologize, in her own Lilly way, for falling short of anyone’s standards for shared living. But by this point, I wasn’t feeling terribly forgiving.

Thanks, I’m sure, I said in the voice I saved for men who didn’t stand a chance, and was gratified to see a wave of confusion cross Lilly’s dopey face.

For one lovely moment, I had instilled in her a particle of artistic self-doubt.

16. Balloon man, New York, 1953

17. Newspaper clipping, “Eyes on Photography,” The New York Times, December 18, 1953, annotated in red, blue, and black ink

This season’s group showing of student work at the New School is a reminder of the form’s growing popularity, with one standout worth mentioning. In Lillian Preston’s “Balloon man,” the spectrum of grays forms a veritable rainbow in a bouquet of sunlit balloons. While the vendor’s wares obscure his sitting torso, his threadbare trousers and shabby shoes supply a powerful counterpoint to the humor of his balloon body. The sophisticated grasp of form and technique displayed by Miss Preston shows that she is a photographer to watch.