Feast Your Eyes Read online

  Darling, do you still say my name when you look up at the stars? I can’t always find a star in the sky here, but each night I try. My latest letters with my New York address are probably still on their way to you, and it’s anyone’s guess whether Mother will forward the letters you may have already sent to Cleveland. Once a day I ask at the reception desk for mail, just in case.

  My budget doesn’t allow for newspapers or magazines, but fortunately there’s almost always an abandoned Times or Post in the sitting room. Even so, there’s hardly ever more than one story about Korea. Usually it’s buried in the middle somewhere, and it’s never about you, thank goodness. Of course, when Life does have something, it’s invariably next to an ad for Frigidaires or Philco radios, as if you and everybody else in Korea were no more significant than a household appliance! Really, I think most people want to forget we’re at war at all.

  We’ve never discussed what will happen once the war ends, but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s hardly fitting for the next Robert Capa to stay in Cleveland. If you ask me, there’s no finer city than New York for a future Life photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner. When you arrive, you’ll have the extra advantage of a very friendly face waiting for you at the station.

  4. American leg (Patty crossing the street), New York, 1953

  LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, JUNE 1953: I have met a nice girl at Katharine House, an aspiring painter called Patricia Stokes who has become my friend. I’ve even photographed her a few times! After we both find work, we are going to rent an apartment in the neighborhood. I don’t know whether I want to go back to working in an office, but there seem to be lots of other suitable opportunities for young women. While I know you and Mother have reservations about the New School, one advantage to their night classes is that I will be able to work and study at the same time. Has any mail arrived for me? I should be at this address for at least another two weeks, so please don’t hesitate to forward anything that may come.

  Even though I wasn’t there (or anywhere) when Lillian took this one, I know exactly how she did it. Lillian was allergic to posed shots, so instead of posing the person, she’d pose the background and wait for someone (in this case, Patricia) to walk in. Lillian called it a spider shot. As far as I was concerned, a longer name would have been better, something full of similar syllables that would take hours to say. Whenever the weather was nice—which for Lillian was anything without rain or snow between 35 and 98 degrees—I spent some serious quality time on benches and stoops while she waited beside her camera for the right person to pass into her perfectly composed frame. My kindergarten teacher thought I was a genius for being able to read chapter books, but by then I’d spent several small lifetimes stuck in places with nothing better to do than try to parse a printed page as Lillian waited beside her web.

  Mostly she didn’t know who that someone would be until they showed up, but in this case she must have known her roommate’s habits and staked out the street corner, waiting for Patricia to strut past the partly burned-out American Legion sign. Without the title’s parenthetical bit, this would be just an anonymous pair of cigarette pants, but the name makes those legs feel as personal as a face.

  Patricia Stokes must have been a veritable emblem of exotic womanhood to Lillian, considering that it was eight more years before my mother owned a pair of pants. Not that she ever wore them outside the darkroom. After Lillian became the American poster child (or at least the poster child’s photographer) for immorality and perversion, some people actually accused her of dressing like a 1950s librarian to mock American decency. For that to be true, she’d have had to put actual thought into her wardrobe, which—going by the skirts and sweater sets—was something she’d stopped doing around age sixteen.

  PATRICIA STOKES: Here’s why I agreed to live with Lilly: when I told her I wanted to be an artist, she asked what kind. Back in Wilmington, “artist” always put an end to the conversation. What kind? Now I must really be in New York! I found a waitressing job at a place on Madison that served Continental food on good china, hailing distance from some of the art galleries. I was convinced it would take only one regular customer, a wealthy collector intrigued by the terribly attractive waitress who made cryptic references to her work while serving his beef Bourguignon. As you might infer, I was eighteen and not awfully original. Anyhow the shift manager and I got along just fine so when one of the waitresses quit I told him I had a friend. Lilly wasn’t experienced, but she was keen to learn. In an abundance of rookie enthusiasm she twisted a corkscrew into a cork without first removing the foil, but as soon as the boss could trust her with a bottle of Bordeaux he started offering her dinner shifts on my nights off. Get this: instead of taking the work like any self-respecting kid desperate to make rent, Lilly told him she’d signed up for evening photography classes starting that fall so he should probably find another girl. Well, that just impressed the hell out of me. It must have impressed our boss, too, because he told Lilly she could work as many dinners as she liked, and he’d schedule her however she needed come September.

  5. Bullfrog (boy selling newspapers), New York, 1953

  Kids don’t show up much in my mother’s work until I come along, which—face it—wouldn’t have happened if she had been more worldly or if the Pill had appeared in 1954 instead of 1960. But being unplanned isn’t the same as being unwanted. For example, the boy in this picture was unplanned. Lillian hadn’t set out to photograph a child on that particular day. Still, it’s easy to tell that as soon as Lillian saw this kid, she fell in love with everything from the angle of his cap, to the tiny snubbed nose above his gigantic open mouth, to the pieces of broken glass glittering at the bottom edge of the frame.

  PATRICIA STOKES: Lilly put the kibosh on a few apartments that had seemed perfectly nice to me. I was beginning to worry that I’d need to find someone less particular if I wanted to escape the Suzy Parkers of Katharine House when Lilly finally found something she liked. The place didn’t seem any worse than the ones she had nixed, plus it was only a few blocks from the Village, so I liked it fine enough.

  But, oh lord, that apartment. The front door opened directly onto the kitchen, with three more rooms lined up one behind the other, railroad-style, all for forty dollars a month—which was decent even back then, but not for no reason. We were on the second floor, right above a grocery. Between the storefront and everything happening outside, it could be hard to conduct a civilized conversation. Trucks rattled past at terrible hours with deliveries for the meatpacking plants. Every morning, before you could properly even call it that, something I called The Monster started hawking newspapers. I stuffed cotton in my ears, but Lilly used The Monster as her personal rooster to log camera time before her lunch shift uptown.

  When she showed me this photo, I thought she was pulling my leg. I’d assumed some burly lumberjack was making all the racket. That boy’s talents were seriously underused: he could have been mounted to a police car during a riot or strapped to a lighthouse on a foggy night and done some real public good. I told Lilly she should hang it on the wall between the kitchen windows so that when we were being serenaded, we’d have the face that went with it, to make the mornings a little easier to bear.

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JULY 1953: It’s so challenging to photograph people in a candid way. You can’t waste any time thinking, you have to take the picture already knowing exactly what to do. Sometimes I manage it, but most of the time I’m still puzzling things out. I’ll be considering composition or light or timing, which inevitably shows up in the print as a kind of distance that reminds anyone who’s looking at it they’re looking at a photograph. I don’t want to make photographs. The way you described it with Capa’s work is exactly right: I want to make windows.

  6. Getting ready (Patty), New York, 1953

  7. Makeup artist on the uptown train, New York, 1953

  At this point Lillian had taken so many shots of Patricia that by the time she got on the same train as this woman
applying eye shadow, I bet she snapped the shutter without knowing why. To hear Lillian describe it, when she was “locked in,” she didn’t tell her finger to press the shutter any more than she told her heart to pump blood.

  Point being, nothing about the uptown eye-shadow woman calls Lillian’s roommate to mind, since the woman in the photo is rounder and shorter and about fifteen years older. But side by side, Makeup Artist and Patricia are twins—or at least cousins, with the same raised brows and parted lips as they put their faces on.

  PATRICIA STOKES: For a while I didn’t mind it, since Lilly’s camera was what drew me to her to begin with. Try to remember, at that point pictures were just things you took for the family album, or for newspapers or magazines. But when I saw what Lilly was doing, I knew I had to start thinking about photography in a new way.

  At first it felt kind of glamorous, being followed around like that, but the feeling didn’t last long. I could never tell whether Lilly was planning to take my picture until I heard the click. The whole conversation, she’d be looking straight at me. Then her hand would start doing its own thing, like it was possessed. It was creepy, if you really want to know. The worst was when she’d disappear for a while, sneak back into whatever room I happened to be in, and then—click. So in a way, the girls at Katharine House were right: she was a spy. I finally made a rule. Lilly could be in the room with me or she could be in the room with her camera, but she couldn’t be in the room with us both.

  8. Woman at the window, New York, 1953

  It may look like a double exposure or a combination print, but it isn’t. Doubters can check the contact sheet, which shows that Lillian got the woman’s expression and the outside reflection all at once. I suppose there’s no way of knowing what the seamstress at the sewing machine is actually pining for, but the way Lillian caught the reflected cars and people and sidewalks makes it easy to think she wants everything on the other side of that pane of glass.

  PATRICIA STOKES: Thinking back, I’d have to say that the lavatory was the beginning of the end. By the time we were moving in, Lilly had a small suitcase full of film she’d shot. When I asked her why she didn’t just drop it off at the drugstore, she looked at me like I was telling her to give away her children. Apparently the whole time we’d been apartment shopping, Lilly had been waiting to find a place with a large enough bathtub and reliable hot water—which is how I learned about darkrooms, but if I had known what I was agreeing to, I never would have said yes! In any case, I was too busy deciding what color to paint the living room to notice Lilly’s peculiar nesting instincts. She was installing an enlarger over the toilet, which turned our lavatory into some sort of cross between a science experiment and a torture chamber. If you weren’t careful, you’d knock your head on the thing when you went to stand up. Then there was that red lightbulb, like something out of a Tennessee Williams play, which made it impossible to check your hair in the mirror. Not that going to the john is terribly complicated, but it’s nice to be able to see yourself once in a while.

  After Lilly set everything up, she was kind enough to invite me to a demonstration. I could barely fit alongside her and all that equipment, but somehow I managed to cram myself into the corner by the door. Lilly lined the bottom of the bathtub with four metal trays, then attached a hose to the faucet. I vaguely remember her explaining what the different chemicals were, and something else about timing as the image appeared on the paper, but to me the whole thing was magic. Lilly’s pictures were just marvelous. Of course they were beautiful, but more than that, they saw through everything that was phony in the world. As consolation, I tried to tell myself that photography was easier than painting: other than pointing the camera in the right direction, you didn’t have to do anything to make a tree look like a tree. Then I’d stand at my easel, and just the thought of all those perfect photos hanging in the bedroom next to mine made it hard to pick up a paintbrush.

  9. Woman in curlers on the Lower East Side, New York, 1953

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JULY 1953: Every day I wake up thrumming with the feeling that each minute spent inside is an opportunity missed, so I get out as soon as I can. Back home, people carry themselves appropriately in public, which is to say in a way that reveals nothing. Here in New York, with everyone living on top of each other, people do what they want, when and where they want. Almost every day reveals someone showing their true face. I still feel like a tourist, but at least I’ve put away Father’s clothes: around here a girl with a camera is about as interesting to people as a fire hydrant. That kind of freedom can feel terribly lonely sometimes, in spite (or perhaps because) of all the people—but it’s truly hard only when I’m lying awake at night wondering why I haven’t heard from you, or when I’m running low on film. The good news is that I’ve found a wonderful camera shop that sells bulk film in hundred-foot batches. I bought a bulk film loader and reloadable film cartridges, so now I can make my own rolls for a fraction of the cost, which means I can spend more time shooting and less time waiting for an airmail envelope with my name on it.

  That’s how Woman in curlers became one of 450 shots Lillian took of ladies on their front stoops. Four hundred and fifty middle-aged matrons in housedresses, smoking, reading newspapers, laughing, talking, staring, napping—which, back in Cleveland, would have been as unusual as a giraffe making its way down Fernvale Road. Okay, fine, but ten rolls of them? Well, Patricia had just revoked Lillian’s camera privileges, leaving poor Lillian full of unresolved stalker impulses. Plus I think Lillian was hoping that after enough photos, she’d somehow absorb the New York nonchalance that allowed these ladies to lounge outside in their housedresses in a city of seven million strangers.

  Curlers is the best of the bunch. The woman is laughing in a way that gives her face a kind of Mona Lisa quality, if Mona Lisa were a wrinkled fiftysomething babushka living on East Second Street. Then there’s the off-center thing. The woman stands at the left edge of the picture, her arm and pointing finger taking up the center so that she’s gesturing toward something outside the frame. It’s like Lillian is trying to tease us with what we can’t see.

  Then again, what do I know? I wasn’t born yet, but by now I’ve spent so much time studying these pictures that I sometimes forget I’m just guessing. The truth is that when my mother was around to ask, I didn’t want to know what was going through her mind. Now that I’m ready, her work is all I have left.

  10. Times Square recruit, New York, 1953

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JULY 1953: Darling, did something happen, or have I somehow upset you? If so, please write and tell me so that I can make amends. In my mind, in my heart, you’re already here.

  Another spider shot, but this time in the true sense of the word. Lillian would have set up her camera in order to watch future soldiers walking in and out that door, not knowing exactly who she wanted until she saw him. With that hand on his hip and his outstretched leg, this guy could almost pass for Fred Astaire, but then all that bodily joy collides with his face.

  If you make a box with your fingers and use it just to frame the guy’s top half and the recruitment office door, this becomes a photo about the Korean War. Take your hand away, and there’s that dancing body and all of Forty-second Street, complicating things. For better or worse (mostly worse), Lillian never thought of herself as political. As far as she was concerned, she was “just interested in people.” Mommy is sick was no different in her mind from Times Square recruit or any other picture she took, which might lead one to ask Miss Just Interested in People why she’d haunt an army recruitment office at the height of the Korean War to begin with. The thing is, I know exactly what she’d say: because it was July and she hadn’t heard from her soldier in a while. Lillian always had reasons for what she did, it’s just that her reasons made sense only if the rest of the world wasn’t part of the equation.

  PATRICIA STOKES: I didn’t happen to know any soldiers in Korea, but Lilly claimed hers would be joining her in New York the minute he was di
scharged, so they could embark upon their “photographic destiny.” She made those words sound practically denominational: Our Lady of the Church of Artistic Fate. For a while I thought her soldier might even be a parable she’d cooked up to duck out of hitting the bar scene with me as a sort of social revenge, since I was more outgoing than she was and knew how to dress. Eventually I got it through my thick skull that, really, Lilly hardly ever thought of me at all.

  His name was Jim or Tom or Don or something equally dreary. I remember he didn’t stand out as wildly handsome. Lilly kept a blurry face pinned to her wall that could have been anyone from the landlord’s son to the Duke of Edinburgh. She blushingly explained it was a blowup she’d made from the framed high school club picture beside her bed. I probably said he had nice eyes or something and changed the subject.

  11. Reunion, New York, 1953

  Lillian’s taste in titles tended toward the oppressively literal, which is what makes this one so intriguing. In the grand tradition of Woman in curlers, this photo should have been called something like “Couple on park bench.” The way his head is lying in her lap suggests, at the very least, two people plenty comfortable with each other rather than two people in the act of reuniting. So, why the poetic title? Just this once, I’m guessing Lillian let her own wishful thinking take over.

  PATRICIA STOKES: It was July when the war ended, and absurdly hot, but Lilly said we ought to throw a party anyway. Of course, she didn’t actually know anyone, so I invited the upstairs neighbors, some of the other waitresses, and everyone from the Art Students League, and they all piled into our stifling apartment like it was a clown car. I hung some new canvases for the occasion. Lilly even installed a regular lightbulb in the john. An abstract painter I had designs on was there, and a surrealist named Lyle something-or-other who went everywhere with a taxidermy bobcat on a leash.