Card Number 258, Miss Mills, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-2) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Cross Cut Cigarettes 1880s

Curator: Looking at this object, I am instantly transported. A vintage sepia photograph on a small card. There’s a quiet kind of magic there, don't you think? Editor: Indeed. This is Card Number 258, "Miss Mills," one from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-2). W. Duke, Sons & Co. issued it in the 1880s as a promotional item for their Cross Cut Cigarettes. It's currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Curator: A cigarette card! So tiny and yet she fills the frame. She's saucy, but somehow still innocent, with those high ruffled bloomers. Is she shading her eyes, peering into some unknown future? I imagine this performer, Miss Mills, gazing optimistically, hopefully towards what's next... Editor: The print, an albumen print, offers a glimpse into the commodification of celebrity and the expansion of advertising culture. Cigarette cards, often collected in albums, became incredibly popular, a way to engage consumers through visual culture and consumer loyalty. Think about the labor involved: from the photographic production and printing process to its circulation, fueled by tobacco farming, manufacturing and sales, these objects embody industrial expansion. Curator: Right. Someone made choices, right from the selection of Miss Mills and her jaunty little sailor costume. The textures almost vibrate, capturing her performance, fixing a fleeting moment into a lasting material artifact to sell…cigarettes. Does the brand appropriate and subsume artistic expression and free expression, or, through being captured here, does this ensure a performer will never really fade away, but live on forever in our consciousness? Editor: Exactly. The very materiality reveals the priorities and the cultural assumptions of the time, particularly how entertainment, consumption, and identity are intertwined through the medium of a cheap printed advertisement. Curator: It feels heavy with ghosts: Miss Mills' hopes, Duke's profit margin. A small treasure holding so many larger cultural cross-currents! Editor: Absolutely, it is a little window into a long gone, but culturally still quite resonant past, reminding us of art's inextricable connections to economics and culture.