Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

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  To Megan;

  to friendship.

  I was ten when I saw it, Pops sitting across the breakfast table with his Daily News and his cigarette. I looked up from my cornflakes, and there it was, staring at me from the front page: a little kid in her underwear with black bars printed over her eyes and her chest. She was holding out a glass of milk to some woman lying on a bed, and there was a dark spot on the sheet between the woman’s legs. The headline above the photo was the same monster size they used when JFK got shot the year before.

  Judge Rules . . . MOMMY IS SICK

  Man, I thought, that girl must have made her mom sick! With a glass of milk! And made her bleed! She had to be real trouble, that girl, because how else do you get your photo on the front page of the newspaper?

  On the TV news that night, she was crossed out just the same, this time sitting on a couch in a beaded necklace. Walter Cronkite said her name was Samantha and her mother was a photographer, Lillian Preston. The pictures in the paper and on TV were from eight photographs that he called “The Samantha Series.” They had been on display in a photography show until the gallery got shut down because Samantha was mostly naked in the pictures, not to mention that the photo from the morning paper, which was actually called Mommy is sick, had to do with abortion. I didn’t know what abortion was, except that it was against the law and some kind of a sin, but that was enough. I grabbed the Daily News from the trash bin and stashed it under my bed, and that was how Samantha Preston became a dark goddess to me. Whenever the world went gray, I would pull out Mommy is sick and stare at a girl who was ten times worse trouble than I ever was, until I’d start to feel better.

  I was twenty before I saw the photo again. I had been in the city a few years, working lousy jobs and going to shows, and my friend Brian and I decided to start a band. As I was looking through one of his crazy scrapbooks, there it was: same picture, same headline. The song came to me right away, like I’d been writing it in my head all that time. When we put out “Mommy Is Sick” as a single, we used a repro of the newspaper clipping for the record sleeve because there was no one to tell us not to. Then we got signed and they told us we had to ask permission for that kind of thing, but it had been ten years and no one we asked even knew who Lillian Preston was, so for the album cover we made our own version: Brian in bed with ketchup between his legs and me in my underwear holding out the milk glass, black grease paint over my eyes and black electrical tape over my B-cups. By the time we were asked to play Saturday Night Live, I was performing in that getup only for special occasions, but national live TV is as special as it comes, which is why America saw just half of “Mommy Is Sick” before I ripped off my dress and the network cut to a commercial.

  A few days later the phone rang. I picked up and a voice asked, “Are you Frances Pell?”

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “This is Samantha,” said the voice on the phone.

  “Samantha who?”

  There was a pause, then a click, and then it was too late.

  After that Brian and I were touring a lot, doing all the stupid things people do living that kind of a life. Whenever we came back to New York, our manager would drop off a box of band mail that had been sent to the label. To sort through it, Brian and I would spend hours holed up in his apartment drinking Jack and Coke. People sent all kinds of stuff: poetry, drawings, love letters, hate letters. One night I opened a big yellow envelope with my name on it, and inside was a picture of me sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car. I had no memory of anyone taking that photo or of sitting on that car to begin with, which wasn’t unusual in those days, but it felt like I’d been spied on. Brian was pissed when I tore the photo in half. He said it was a great shot, but what mattered to me was the invasion of privacy. After Brian grabbed the envelope, he read the note that came with it, then started shaking his head. “Nice job, shithead. You just tore up a photograph by Lillian Preston.” When he showed me her name, I wanted to kick my own ass.

  For the next twenty-odd years of making music, my Lillian Preston story stayed filed away with everything else I wished I’d done differently, until I got a call from a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. They were planning a Lillian Preston show: would I take a look at the photographs, maybe write something for the catalogue? I figured this would be my chance to thank her. The math in my head told me Lillian Preston was in her fifties, so when I got there, I was looking for a middle-aged person. Waiting for me in the curator’s office instead was a woman about my age. I was pretty sure I’d seen her somewhere, but that’s a feeling I get all the time. Then she said, “Are you Frances Pell?”

  Don’t hang up, yelled the voice inside my head. I know who you are.

  For the rest of that day, we looked at her mother’s photographs. I thought they’d all be naked people, but they weren’t, at least not in the usual way. Lillian Preston was mostly a street photographer. She lived her life blending into backgrounds and snapping whoever passed by. For all that, these people aren’t strangers. Sometimes it’s a look in the eyes, or the way someone is standing, but what’s unfamiliar lifts away. The people in Lillian Preston’s pictures seem like people I know. Sometimes, looking at a stranger, it feels like I’m looking at myself.

  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.”

  And so this catalogue was written by someone whose life was tangled up in these photographs along with the lives of all the people who helped make them, whether they were standing in front of the camera, behind the camera, or somewhere off to the side. Because of that, it’s not like any catalogue you’ve read before. It’s personal. It’s unprofessional. And when the art-establishment types saw it, they were smart enough to leave it alone.

  —Frances Pell, aka “Franny Panic”

  New York, 1990

  CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION

  * * *

  All works are by Lillian Preston unless otherwise noted and are from the artist’s estate.

  Greenwich Village, 1953–54

  * * *

  1. Untitled [Prentice High Camera Club, Cleveland], 1951 Unknown photographer

  Feast your eyes, America. Here she is: America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer—depending on who’s talking—as an anonymous high school junior, sporting the same light blouse/dark skirt combo and fake smile as the other girls. Look for a face with wide-set eyes and bangs at the end of the Camera Club’s second row. Lilly Preston, who was never elected to class office or Most or Best anything. Other than Honor Society, this was the only high school club she was in.

  Don’t blame me for the pencil marks. I never touched my mother’s photos. The first circled face is her photography teacher, Mr. Clark. The second is the Camera Club’s president, Sam Decker, “the best photographer no one ever heard of.” That description, which Lillian added whenever she showed off this picture, was the only time I heard her deploy anything resembling sarcasm.

  Apparently my mother started writing Sam when she was a high school senior, at which point he’d already enlisted in the army and was serving in Korea. As far as I know, she never showed anyone else the letters she sent to him, the drafts of which she wrote in her journal. And because I only ever violated her privacy in the usual places—her bedside table, her bureau, beneath her mattress—I never found them. Not that I considered her photo boxes any more sacred than her underwear drawer, but at the time of my rabidly dysfunctional adolescence (not to be confused with my rabidly dysfunctional adulthood), fooling with those boxes would have implied an interest in her photography.

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JUNE 1953: My Dearest Darling, I did it. After all these months of writing and planning and worrying, getting on that bus was the second-hardest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest was telling Father that instead of enrolling at Ursuline College, as he and Mother expected, I plan to attend photography classes at the New School. It’s funny: since I was little, I knew I was meant to live differently from others, I just wasn’t sure how or why. And so I earned decent grades and washed the dishes and ironed my skirts and spoke in turn, which led people to see me as a “good” girl, when really I was just waiting for that different life to reveal itself. Just as I was beginning to worry that waiting was all there would ever be, I picked up a camera—but you know this already. You’re the only one who understands when I say that making pictures makes me fully and truly myself.

  Thanks so much for the early anniversary present. I know how much we both like to complain about the mail but this time, at least, the army came through because it arrived the week before I left for New York. I don’t have pierced ears, but they’re such lovely earrings that I may need to change that so I can wear them properly—perhaps in time for our actual anniversary two months from now, especially if you’re back by then and we can celebrate together. In the meantime, they make marvelous pins to fasten to my blouse. Whenever I look at them, I imagine I was with you in Kyoto during those five days on leave. It’s hard to believe it’s only been ten months since my first letter introduced you to a certain Camera Club member who spent her junior year admiring you and your prints without ever saying hello. Even as I rue the distance between here and Korea, I cannot avoid the strange truth of us: had you stayed in Cleveland, I’d never have summoned the courage to make any introductions at all. If you hadn’t enlisted, we’d still be strangers, and I would probably be pinning an Ursuline pennant to my bedroom wall.

  I won’t go into the gory details of Father’s reaction after I told him about New York, but when he finally realized he couldn’t stop me, he decided he’d rather help than “throw me to the wolves.” Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be grateful for his asking the pastor about Christian rooming establishments, but Katharine House is nicer than any hotel I’d have been able to afford, and being around other gals who are also new to the city feels a little less like living with strangers. The only problem is that the quiet girl with bangs who sat in the back row of Camera Club has followed me here. There are days I don’t say more than five words between getting out of bed and returning to my room at the end of the day. Luckily, I’ve got my pictures. I’m taking rolls and rolls of them, and though I haven’t developed any yet (the basic amenities here don’t include a darkroom), I can see so many of them in my mind that they supply their own sort of company.

  2. Young woman with suitcase in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, New York, 1953

  Not Lillian. Compare it to the girl in the Camera Club photo and you’ll see that Young Woman’s nose is too pointy and the hair is too dark, not to mention that the body is all wrong, but I think Lillian still saw herself in the person stepping off that bus. Why? Because even though the station around Young Woman is a big, busy blur, she doesn’t seem lost or even alone. One look at her face and you can tell she’s exactly where she wants to be.

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JUNE 1953: It’s silly, but back at home wearing a shirt and coat of Father’s on my Saturday photography walks somehow gave me a kind of permission and made me feel less conspicuous. I intended to leave those clothes behind, but in the end I couldn’t imagine stalking New York without my usual camouflage. Every time I put them on, I feel a twinge of guilt, followed by a trace of comfort.

  So far I’ve kept almost completely to the bus station: it’s something to do with all those suitcases, and all the faces to whom those suitcases belong. There are so many ways to greet a city! Some people look as if they’re waiting for someone, but if you keep watching, you’ll see that they’re not disappointed when no one comes. That’s because they’re waiting for the city to meet them, and it always does.

  3. Breakfast at Katharine House, New York, 1953

  Just look at all those paragons of young womanhood hovering over their cereal bowls. Use a black marker to draw a wimple on each head and—ta-da—instant nunnery. Part of it has to do with the long, narrow wooden tables, but mostly it’s the way Lillian captured the sun beaming through those high roominghouse windows, bathing all those bright-eyed girls in churchly light. The one who became her roommate in her first New York apartment is fourth from the bottom right.

  PATRICIA STOKES: I’d not been at Katharine House more than a week when Lilly showed up, and immediately I said to myself: this one is worth getting to know. It was easy to see she was the most interesting hat on the stand. While the rest of us were busy reinventing ourselves—which mostly meant a lot of talk and nail lacquer and twisting and pinning our hair overnight to turn us all into Elizabeth Taylor—there was Lilly perched at the other end of the room, wearing a man’s shirt, with just a few barrettes to keep her hair out of her face and a camera practically attached to the end of her arm like a second hand. At breakfast she’d set it right beside her prunes and oatmeal like it was the morning paper. She was nice enough if you tried to cha
t her up, but mostly she just took pictures.

  It didn’t take long for the rumors to fly. One girl insisted Lilly was a spy for the Reds, another that she was a scout for the Ford Modeling Agency. Well, that got all the aspiring Suzy Parkers in a lather. Suddenly there was a lot of languorous posing on the divans. At that point I didn’t know who or what Lilly was, just that she was the only girl besides me not hawking head shots or shorthand.

  When I told her about the rumors, I got treated to her laugh. Lilly laughed like a bicycle pump. Her face turned red and her mouth opened up and you’d brace yourself for something loud, but instead this positively delicate hss-hss sound would come from between those prim lips of hers; it was the funniest thing. Then it turned out that all those times in the parlor, she hadn’t even been taking our pictures! Like every other girl too poor to stay at the Barbizon, Lilly was on a strict budget, so she saved most of her film for walking around. Since she was too shy to actually talk to anyone, she mooned about downstairs taking what she called “practice snaps” with her empty camera just to avoid being alone. I kept that juicy tidbit to myself: I was having too much fun watching the fashion plates flash their profiles every time Lilly walked into a room.

  LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JUNE 1953: Father refused me any going-away money, having made it clear that he viewed all those hours I spent working in his office as wages earned under false pretenses. Technically that isn’t true: only Father ever described it as “pin money” for my freshman year, but it’s equally true that I never corrected him. I suppose, then, that I’m guilty as charged—but to my own mind, what matters is that I never lied about it, even if Father doesn’t see the difference!

  Some days the disappointment I’ve caused them is easy to shrug off, and I launch myself into the city feeling equal to anything. Other days (today, for instance) it’s a struggle just to leave my room. If I were to go back, Mother would forgive me everything; it wouldn’t take long for Father to come around; and I’d attend Ursuline College, and take classes in English or history, with a wall of my room saved for showing off my “little hobby,” just like Father and his model planes.