Amazonian Dancer, from the Dancing Women series (N186) issued by Wm. S. Kimball & Co. 1889

This small card, ‘Amazonian Dancer’, was produced by the Wm. S. Kimball & Company, as part of a series included in packs of cigarettes. These cards used chromolithography, a process involving printing with multiple stones to create a color image. The result is richly detailed, but the process demanded a lot of labor. Each color required a separate stone and a skilled printer to apply it. The success of chromolithography was closely tied to industrial capitalism. The cards were cheap to produce on a mass scale, and widely distributed thanks to the booming tobacco industry. The image itself is a fantasy, not a documentary record. ‘Amazonian’ suggests a woman warrior from classical mythology, but here she is presented as an exoticized figure for popular consumption. The layers of labor – from the making of the image, to the harvesting of the tobacco, to its distribution and ultimate disposal – are all part of the picture, whether they are visible or not.