Untitled (two young girls posing on front lawn with one girl in tree and the other with her hands over her eyes) 1961

Editor: This gelatin silver print, by Martin Schweig, shows two young girls, one playfully covering her eyes, the other climbing a tree. There's a strange, almost haunting quality to it. How do you interpret this work through a historical lens? Curator: The inverted tones are unsettling. This likely reflects photographic experimentation. Consider how photographic negatives were once kept private. What does it mean to publicly display an inverted image of children in a domestic space? Editor: It makes you wonder about the photographer's intention in sharing such a personal, yet distorted, scene. Curator: Exactly. And how the presentation of childhood innocence is constructed and sometimes manipulated in visual culture. The inversion changes everything. Editor: I never thought about it that way. It definitely adds another layer to understanding the image.