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of his to the camera—tie, striped pajamas, Champion Dart Board. He mugs a forced grin and mouths, “Just what I wanted for Christmaaas!” My mother sits cross-legged on the floor in a ruffled blouse and pleated skirt, staring at her gifts with a wan expression: apron, bedroom slippers, baby-doll nightie.
    In the final minutes of “Susie’s First Christmas,” the camera shifts to an eight-month-old me, wobbling to a precarious standing position before the full-length hall mirror, baby-fat fingers scrabbling along the slick surface for a purchase. I press my nose and then crush my whole face against the mirror, as if searching for something behind the reflection. What the film hid, I thought as I watched it decades later, was my father. Who was nowhere more absent than in the brief moments when he appeared on-screen, surrounded by the props of his American family, parading an out-of-the-box identity before the camera, splicing himself, frame by frame, into a man whose story had been replaced by an image, an image of anyone and no one.
    By then, he was working in a darkroom in the city, commuting to a windowless chamber that would become as thoroughly his domain as our suburban basement. He became a master of photographic development and manipulative techniques: color conversions, montages, composites, and other transmutations of the pre-Photoshop trade. “Trick photography,” he called it. He always smelled of fixer.
    My father was particularly skilled at “dodging,” making dark areas look light, and “masking,” concealing unwanted parts of the picture. “The key is control,” he liked to say. “You don’t expose what you don’t want exposed.” In the aquarium murk where he spent his daytime hours, hands plunged in chemical baths, a single red safelight for navigation, he would shade and lighten and manipulate, he would make body parts, buildings, whole landscapes disappear. He had achieved in still photography what he had thought possible only in film. He made the story come out the way he wanted it to.
    His talent made him indispensable in certain quarters—most notably in Condé Nast’s art production department. From the ’60s to the ’80s, Condé Nast relied on my father to perform many of the most difficult darkroom alterations for the photography that appeared in its premier magazines,
Vogue
,
Glamour
,
House & Garden
,
Vanity Fair
,
Brides
. For years a note that one magazine art director had sent to another hung in my father’s studio: “Send it to Steve Faludi—don’t send it to anyone else!” My father performed his “tricks” on the work of some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of the time—Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo, Irving Penn, Bert Stern—at several commercial photo agencies and, later, on his own at his one-man business, Lenscraft Studios, in a garment-district loft previously occupied by fashion photographer Hank Londoner. He also worked his magic on many vintage photographs whose negatives had been lost; he could create a perfect copy from a print. Among the classic images he worked on were those by the preeminent Hungarian photographer (and World War II Jewish refugee), André Kertész. My father’s handiwork “was so precise and close and meticulous, there would be no bleeding of color or light,” Dick Cole, the director of Condé Nast’s art production department in that period, told me many years later, as we sat in his living room in Southern California, leafing through glossy coffee-table books that featured my father’s artifice. “It was amazing. You could never tell what had been changed. You couldn’t tell the original from the copy.”
    Occasionally as a small child I would take the commuter train to the city with my father and visit one of the series of Manhattan photo agencies where he worked. He’d lead