Untitled (girl with dolls standing next to lawn chair in yard) after 1940

Paul Gittings made this untitled black and white photograph of a girl with dolls in a yard at an unknown date. The setting is clearly suburban, and the little girl and her dolls are staged with a kind of formal intent. The dolls themselves offer a clue to understanding the image. One is a baby doll, and the other is more mature. The young girl holds the infant, while the older doll occupies the stroller. The dolls perform a social script that the girl is expected to learn. It would be interesting to examine the records of the Gittings portrait studio in Houston to understand who commissioned this image and why, and to see how the accoutrements of middle-class life in the United States were being portrayed in the mid-20th century. As art historians, we believe meaning in art is a function of its original social context.