I’ll be honest: I didn’t always like what I saw. It’s hard being jolted like that, time after time, truth after truth, in black and white. But it’s also beautiful. These photos—whatever else they may be—are also beautiful. Some of them are from before anyone heard of Lillian Preston or “The Samantha Series,” but most are from the years that came after Lillian and her daughter had been threatened, followed, and forced to change their address and phone number. After Lillian had been called brilliant, poetic, brave, visionary, exploitative, criminal, neglectful, selfish, and a bad mother. By 1973, when the Supreme Court finally got around to changing the definition of what was obscene—not to mention rewriting abortion law—Lillian Preston had pretty much stopped showing her pictures to anyone. Luckily, that wasn’t the same thing as not making pictures at all.

If you’re reading this, you already know all that. You’ve seen the photographs at the show, or you’ve looked through the images in the front half of this catalogue, and you’ve seen all that hard beauty for yourself. So let me tell you something you don’t know: aside from the seven thousand rolls of film and hundreds of prints Lillian left behind when she died, separate from the binders of technical notes, were three boxes. Box One held Lillian’s twenty-four journals from the summer she split Cleveland at age seventeen to the day cancer killed her at forty. Box Two contained the prints she’d made for this exhibition, plus a letter asking her daughter to bring them to MoMA, in case they might do for her dead what they’d never done for her alive. Box Three had the prints and negatives from “The Samantha Series” and a letter giving her daughter a choice: destroy them, or include them with the prints in Box Two.

Believe it or not, the woman Samantha Jane Preston turned into was going to let some curatorial shirt write about the photographs in this exhibition. “Are you crazy?” I told her. “The only one who can do that is you. You’re the one who lived with Lillian, who fought with her, who knew her friends, who went through the whole Samantha thing and came out the other end. Use everything—use her diaries, use her letters, go back and talk to the important people in her life—to show her work in a way that an art-establishment type never could.” I got a long stare after that, or what I thought was a long stare until I realized that she’d gone somewhere deep inside herself and I just happened to be standing in front of her. Then, in a quiet voice that was more for herself than anyone else, she said, “It’s too late for a lot of things, but I guess it’s not too late for that.”