Untitled (portrait of girl in glasses) c. 1950

Curator: This arresting image, whose creators are Lucian and Mary Brown, is an untitled portrait of a girl in glasses, preserved at the Harvard Art Museums. Editor: It's strikingly spectral, almost like an x-ray—the inverted tones give it an eerie beauty. Curator: There's an element of seeing the unseen, yes. I find it powerful how such a seemingly straightforward portrait is rendered so unsettling. What does it reveal about the sitter, and about representation itself? Editor: Perhaps it speaks to the ways women were often framed in photographic portraiture—often as idealizations, rarely as subjects in their own right. The inversion seems to disrupt that. Curator: It's a ghost of an idea, then—a woman emerging from the very act of being looked at. It challenges how we perceive identity. Editor: Absolutely. I hadn't considered the implications of how light and shadow could be tools for reclaiming agency, even in a portrait.