Untitled (little girl on her first birthday with open and wrapped presents, feather in hair) c. 1955

This photograph, taken by Paul Gittings, captures a child's first birthday, immortalized on film. It’s a world of soft focus, a blurry dreamscape of infancy. I imagine Gittings, peering through the lens, trying to capture something so ephemeral, so impossible to hold. The light flares, the edges bleed, and the moment slips away, preserved yet transformed. What was it like to witness this scene unfold, the child amidst open presents, the feather in her hair a delicate crown? Isn’t it funny how photographs, like paintings, try to contain the uncontainable? They give us a glimpse, a fragment, a shadow of something that once was. And in that shadow, we find our own stories, our own memories, our own fleeting moments of being. Just like other artists, Gittings is asking us to pause and see the art in the everyday.