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walls.
    Nevertheless, Laurel always preferred her film cameras, because—unlike most of the aspiring female photographers she had met in high school or in college—she actually enjoyed her work in the darkroom. Printing and toning. Moreover, she preferred black and white because she thought it offered both greater clarity and deeper insight into her subjects. In her opinion, you understood a person better in black and white, whether it was an abruptly homeless little girl in Burlington, Vermont, in the early years of the twenty-first century or a pair of drunken revelers at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties eighty years earlier.
    On a certain level she felt voyeuristic, a bit like Diane Arbus, especially when she would photograph the children with their mothers. The mothers all looked dazed and drugged (which, sometimes, they were) and more than a little sociopathic (which, again, sometimes they were). But Laurel also had a thick notebook filled with nothing but contact sheets of her cousin Martin, who had Down syndrome, and she wondered if she would always feel slightly Arbus-like whenever she took anyone’s picture because so much of her training since junior high school had involved shooting him. Martin was a year older than she was, and he loved musical theater. His mother, Laurel’s aunt, had sewn enough costumes for him over the years to fill a walk-in closet, and Martin would model these for Laurel for hours. The results were pages and pages of contact sheets of a teenage boy with Down syndrome, imitating in his own way everyone from Yul Brynner in
The King and I
to Harvey Fierstein in
Hairspray.
Laurel actually spent much of her recovery after she was attacked with Martin. Her friends from high school were all off at their colleges, and so she was very glad she had her cousin in her life. Her mother still referred to that period as that “awful autumn,” but in Laurel’s opinion it really hadn’t been all that awful once she had returned to Long Island. She slept. She journaled. She healed. She and Martin must have seen a half-dozen Broadway shows together in those months of darkening days, always a matinee, which meant that when they entered the theater it was daytime and when they emerged it was evening and Times Square was an invigorating, phantasmagoric display of light. Then, the next day, careful not to jostle her slowly mending collarbone, they would reenact again and again their favorite scenes. Laurel was content in her own very specialized cocoon. And once she could use both of her arms again, she took even more pictures of a young man decked out in capes and bowlers and
Scarlet Pimpernel
wigs.
    Every so often when Laurel was still in college, a single woman would wind up at the family shelter who was only a year or two older than she was. These women were at an age in which they were too old for the emergency shelter for teens run by another group in another section of the city, a small world where they might actually have felt the safest, but they were still too young to be comfortable in the wing of the shelter cordoned off for adults. Consequently, if there was room and they were clean—free of drugs, though not necessarily of grime and lice—they would be allowed to stay in the section for families.
    Laurel would photograph them, too, even though more times than not they would try to sexualize the experience. Sex was their only currency and they used it determinedly if inappropriately. They would begin to peel off their tops, unsnap and unzip their jeans, or touch themselves and pout at the lens as if they were modeling for an adult magazine. They would, as the song said, try to show her their tattoos. It was almost a reflex for them because instinctively they ached even for Laurel’s approval, and they knew cold and hunger intimately.
    Only when she had been at the shelter close to a year and grown more comfortable with the world of the homeless did she begin to photograph the men,