JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1955: It occurs to me that it is almost four years exactly since Mr. Clark took the Camera Club on the field trip that changed my life. He’d told us that on the rare occasion the Cleveland Museum showed photography, it filled a narrow hallway leading to the restrooms, but this time the museum had mounted a proper exhibition. When I got there, I saw something that shocked me: photos hanging on gallery walls, complete with their own cards giving the title, the photographer, the year, and all the other details that announce legitimate works of art. I only vaguely remember the images: scenes from Amish country, pastoral landscapes. What remains is a feeling like a rocket launching inside my chest. I promised myself that someday my prints would line the walls of a museum, the card mounted beside each one proclaiming “Lillian Preston, Photographer.” Four years ago, that vision felt like the end of a fairy tale. Now I know it marks a beginning.

37. Hot dog vendor on Fifty-third Street, New York, 1955

Funny how Lillian’s title neglects to mention that it’s the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Museum of Modern Art. Not having studied art or photography in college (surprise, surprise), the Faces of Our World show was off my radar, but the date of the photo makes it a safe bet that the line of people stretching across the background and beyond are a few of the 250,000 museum visitors who saw Faces between January and May, a period you may or may not have noticed contains the run of a certain other photography show going on fifty blocks south. Did Lillian’s MoMA fixation begin then? Possibly. It’s also possible I was there when she snapped the shutter on this man’s smile, on what was probably one of his better days for selling hot dogs.

JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 1955: Now I finally know what Mr. Wythe meant that day at Aperçu when he said that my work wasn’t uplifting enough for Kleinmann. Faces may be the most beautiful photography exhibit anyone has ever made. To experience it is to grasp the enormous potential—of art and of people—to do good in the world. So much so, it was impossible not to feel the weight of all that potential breathing down my neck! My pictures aren’t nearly so pointed. I just want people to see.

I’m tired and hungry practically all the time, but I don’t mind because those feelings are connected to you. Without that book from Renaldo, I doubt I could have faced down all the scowling nurses telling me over and over that formula was best during the first bleary days in the hospital when I kept refusing their bottles even though you were hungry, and I was sore, and neither of us knew what we were doing. But now, feeding you is the most soothed I’ve ever felt, a sense of completeness unlike anything else.