Helen Lamont, from the Actresses series (N246), Type 2, issued by Kinney Brothers to promote Sporting Extra Cigarettes 1888 - 1892

This portrait of Helen Lamont was created by the Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company as a promotional item for Sporting Extra Cigarettes. The photograph is a mass-produced object, made possible by industrial printing techniques. Its sepia tone evokes a sense of nostalgia, but it also speaks to the scale of production. Consider the labor involved in both the cultivation of tobacco and the printing of these cards. These images of actresses became commodities, small tokens of desire distributed with every pack of cigarettes. This connection between glamour and consumerism is a powerful one, and the photograph itself becomes a kind of currency, exchanged for attention and desire. The Kinney Brothers were not making art in the traditional sense, but they were certainly crafting a cultural landscape. The material and the image are inseparable from the context of their creation, a world of expanding markets and mass media.