DEBORAH BRODSKY: On Tuesdays, a bunch of us would come together to share whatever we happened to have—beans, greens, beer, bread, grass, a can of anchovies—and we’d eat and drink and talk and get high, and if there were friends of friends passing through, they’d come and tell us where they’d been. Occasionally things got pretty wild. People would pair off in combinations that didn’t match the pairs they’d arrived in or that weren’t pairs at all. Sometimes this felt like exploring a new way to live, and sometimes it just felt like a bad idea. Lilly wasn’t part of that. She didn’t drink much, and she didn’t smoke, not even cigarettes. On the nights things got tangled, she’d have wandered back to her darkroom long before, but the way she held herself separate wasn’t judgment. It was just her being herself.

Sometimes I’d forget Lilly was there, which was exactly what she wanted. She didn’t take many pictures. When I asked, she told me she mainly took the camera along for practice. She said it allowed her to focus her eye, but I think it gave her something to do with her hands. Anyway, it was during one of those pre-tangled Tuesdays that Lilly got Kyle. He’d just breezed in from California, he and Juno shooting across Route 66 in that mustard-colored Cadillac in a hurry for reasons that made sense at the time. This was when Kyle was just starting on Rude Poems, though he was already acting like he was famous. Kyle was born big and blustery; he filled up the room. But Lilly caught him. Those big round eyes of his that always saw everything around him are looking inward, and his face is a mixture of fear and pain and hope and wonder at what it sees.

I didn’t see the picture until Lilly gave him a copy. Naturally Kyle interpreted it as a romantic gesture and tried to use it to invite himself downstairs to Lilly’s place, but that’s not what it was about. Lilly is one of the few people I know, gay or straight, who ever declined one of Kyle’s propositions. And when Rude Poems was published, it was Lilly’s photo on the back cover. And of course, like so many iconic images, the people who recognize the photograph never give a moment’s thought to the photographer.

25. Man on fire escape, New York, 1954