JOURNAL ENTRY, FEBRUARY 1954: As much as I would like to belong here, this neighborhood has no use for a young single girl who doesn’t speak its language. The women merely eye me with suspicion when they look at me at all, but the men are even harder to take. Just the other day one was trailing me—a square-jawed fellow in a stained shirt and work pants—calling after me in what I think was Polish. When I turned around to ask what he wanted, he slowly looked me up and down. “How much?” he asked in perfectly intelligible English. To my complete embarrassment, I blushed. Deb wouldn’t have blushed. Deb would have burned holes into the man’s chest with her eyes and marched off as if she were leading a parade. I need to be tougher. But it’s so hard to be tough when all I want is to be invisible!

20. Washing day, New York, 1954

Lillian thought landscapes were boring. Without people, a picture looked empty to her. That doesn’t mean she never took the odd “empty” photo, but whenever she did, a sense of people fills the emptiness. I’m thinking this clothesline was hanging across the ventilation shaft outside her apartment window, because she would have needed to log some quality time looking at it before catching the wind at such a perfect moment. The breeze is filling the man’s undershirt, making it easy to imagine the kind of barrel-chested gorilla it’s meant for. The stained apron hanging limp beside it on the clothesline gives an ominous feeling, like we’ve stumbled onto a crime scene one moment too late.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: My first visit to her apartment, Lilly took me into the darkroom and explained how it all worked. It was like watching a conjurer produce doves from thin air. I never got tired of that: whenever I needed to escape my own dramas, I’d go downstairs to Lilly’s and knock on the door. If she was in the mood for company, she’d let me in. I’d follow her into the darkroom, standing perfectly still in the dim red light, watching her images rise to the surface.