Card 649, Miss Emerson, from the Actors and Actresses series (N45, Type 1) for Virginia Brights Cigarettes 1885 - 1891

Curator: What immediately strikes me about this portrait is its palpable warmth. The sepia tones give "Card 649, Miss Emerson" a certain antique quality, inviting you into another era. There's something so intimate about it. Editor: Intimacy born of industry! This promotional print, made between 1885 and 1891 by Allen & Ginter for Virginia Brights Cigarettes, exists because of new manufacturing technologies and evolving ideas about advertising and mass consumption. It blurs the line between art and marketing. Curator: Interesting! She gazes softly to her left. Is that demureness, or knowing what’s to come? It reminds me of those photo booth strips from carnivals, moments plucked and recontextualized to hawk tobacco products. But how extraordinary, don’t you think, that mass production creates moments that linger as objects of artistic and social historical analysis? Editor: Exactly. This wasn't fine art in the traditional sense but a product of its time, indicative of shifts in labor and leisure. Look at the way print and photography blend – colored pencil detail enhancing photographic reproduction. Consumption fueled its creation, influencing both artistic and industrial processes. How does that industrial process change our viewing? Curator: It casts the idea of artistic genius as an old, tired idea, in my mind. The gaze she offers could lure potential clients in...or perhaps mock them for their susceptibility to a well-crafted fantasy. The tension of that uncertainty… delicious, really! Editor: I think that fantasy lies in the conflation of art, celebrity and capital, each reflected and reinforced by material conditions. How interesting it is to examine what a portrait such as this represents. We see Miss Emerson and her era, both filtered through consumer products. Curator: Ah, the layered depths of what looks on the surface to be merely quaint! Thanks to a portrait of an actress reproduced for tobacco products, a small, simple image opens us up to wider, much more complex explorations. Editor: Absolutely. And considering how everyday this image once was, now as a surviving historical and cultural object in the Met collection, it prompts deeper contemplation of the intertwining paths of artistic, material, and economic value.