Untitled (portrait of girl with ringlet hair in long dress holding doll) c. 1955

This gelatin silver print, "Untitled (portrait of girl with ringlet hair in long dress holding doll)" is by Paul Gittings and resides in the Harvard Art Museums. Immediately, the stark contrast seizes your attention. The inversion of light and shadow transforms a familiar subject into something haunting. The girl's rigid posture and the doll's vacant stare introduce a subtle discord. Typically, portraiture aims to capture likeness and project status, but here the reversed tonality and limited midtones flatten depth and texture. The composition is vertically-oriented, heightening the subject. Yet, the flatness undermines conventional notions of the portrait as a window into the subject's soul. Gittings uses the photographic negative to disrupt our expectations, challenging the assumed objectivity of the medium. It is this conscious manipulation of form and tonality that pushes us to question photography's role in representing reality.