Untitled (photograph of "Aphrodite": woman with covering over hair and flower) c. 1940

This is an untitled photograph by Paul Gittings, housed here at the Harvard Art Museums. Immediately, the inverted tonality strikes us—whites for darks, blacks for lights—a reversal that reframes our perception. The subject, a woman adorned with a flower and a head covering, is rendered in this stark contrast, creating a spectral allure. The composition, tight and intimate, focuses on the subject’s face in profile. Gittings uses light and shadow not to reveal, but to conceal, abstracting the figure into a play of forms. There is a clear classical reference, the title suggests a relation to Aphrodite, yet the photographic negative destabilizes this association. The semiotic structure is complex. The flower, a traditional symbol of beauty and ephemerality, is muted, almost lost in the inversion. The photograph challenges established meanings of beauty and representation. What we're left with is a meditation on form, light, and the very essence of photographic representation, inviting us to question the stability of meaning itself.