Card Number 165, Miss Millivard, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-6) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Duke Cigarettes 1880s

Curator: Isn’t this charming? This is "Card Number 165, Miss Millivard," from the Actors and Actresses series. W. Duke, Sons & Co. created it in the 1880s as a promotional item for their Duke Cigarettes. It combines photography with, presumably, printmaking. Editor: She looks wistful, almost dreamy. The soft sepia tones enhance the sense of nostalgia, a delicate sadness, wouldn't you say? Curator: Absolutely. But thinking about W. Duke, Sons & Co., these cards weren't made to inspire wistful longing. These were churned out, part of the industrial machine meant to addict more people to nicotine. Miss Millivard’s image, produced en masse, cheap materials, wide distribution, aimed at capturing as much market share as possible... the commodification of beauty and talent, literally stuck inside a cigarette pack. Editor: Well, isn't that the duality of beauty? She's transformed into something…marketable. Imagine, though, her fleeting fame immortalized on something so fragile, so ephemeral, even if attached to the grubby business of tobacco! What was her life like, did she ever see this little card? Curator: Precisely! The backs of these cards, I believe, sometimes even included details about cigarette manufacturing. Talk about a collision of worlds. It makes you question the whole concept of "art" itself, doesn’t it? Who decides what deserves reverence? Is it the hand of the artist, or is it context? Or is it about the conditions that let the work breathe? Editor: Both, maybe? There is something strangely intimate about seeing Miss Millivard looking back at us from across so many years, however she got there, or why. That combination of photographic likeness reproduced through commercial means - a pre-digital snapshot that has survived time's little erosions. Curator: In a way, Miss Millivard lives on in these small images and even if she might not get any royalties, the layers behind them tell of their moment and she, almost ghostly, gets to join our very present. Editor: And from a mass-produced cigarette card, that is almost something, isn't it?