Untitled (meal on table, plate with food and mug, seen from above) c. 1950

Curator: Looking at this image, I see an intimate still life, an overhead view of a meal. Editor: It's striking how the negative transforms the mundane into something almost otherworldly, like an X-ray of a memory. Curator: Exactly. The inverted tones make the food appear like ghostly presences. It's an untitled work by Jack Gould, held in the Harvard Art Museums. Editor: Given the photographic process, I wonder about Gould's darkroom practices. Was this a standard negative, or did he manipulate it to achieve this stark contrast? Curator: Perhaps he sought to unearth the latent symbolic weight in a familiar domestic scene, rendering nourishment as something both essential and spectral. Editor: The way the table and window are handled, it really brings the viewer to consider how we imbue ordinary objects with meaning through the labor of their making and the contexts of their use. Curator: It pushes us to contemplate how we view nourishment itself, doesn't it? Editor: Absolutely, and it makes me think about how the process itself is a kind of consumption.