Untitled (hand holding cigarette) 1953

Curator: This photograph, attributed to Lester Cole, is simply titled "Untitled (hand holding cigarette)." What catches your eye first? Editor: It's immediately noir. The stark contrast, the cigarette smoke, the cuff...it feels like a still from a 1940s detective film. Curator: It certainly evokes that era. Consider how the inverted tones give a ghostly quality to a rather commonplace image. It hints at certain film-making conventions popular at the time. Editor: The hand is almost skeletal against the gauzy background. It's a study in contrasts, life and death intertwined, all in a single frame. Curator: Indeed, the photograph transforms something as mundane as smoking into a dramatic statement on temporality. What is your feeling as we move on? Editor: Now I'm wondering about what the role of photography, generally, plays in shaping and reinforcing our collective memories of the era.