I didn't start out to become a photographer. My path led me from upper-middle-class Los Angeles, where I was born, to the impoverished streets of West Oakland, where I first took up my camera with conviction. This outcome was nothing I'd imagined as the twin daughter of an aristocratic and artistic Jewish mother and musical, erudite European father who was a refugee from the Holocaust. When I entered college, I had pictured a liberal education followed by romance, marriage with children, and maybe a job on the side. I never imagined becoming a photographer, professor, and feminist, or inventing my own visual forms of 'intimate documentary.' The tensions between realism and idealization, photography and fantasy have been present throughout my adult life, as they are in this book.