Untitled (woman lying on floor looking at fashion magazines) 1952

Curator: This is an untitled photograph by Jack Gould, housed here at the Harvard Art Museums. It depicts a woman lying on the floor, surrounded by fashion magazines. Editor: The first thing that strikes me is the image’s stark tonality—almost like a photographic negative—and how that flattening effect really accentuates the materiality of the magazines themselves. Curator: Right. The negative appearance almost inverts our expectations of glamour and consumption. We are looking at the raw materials, the means of representation itself. Editor: Exactly. And consider the labor involved in producing these images, not just the woman’s leisure time, but the photographic process itself, the printing—all the hands that touched these materials before they reached this floor. Curator: It points to the broader industry that manufactures desire and aspiration, but in an oddly detached way. The woman seems almost swallowed by the glossy pages. Editor: It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what she’s hoping to find there? Curator: Indeed, a complex interplay of aspiration and the physical reality of image-making. Editor: A striking and insightful compression of leisure, labor, and material culture.