Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap, Captain, Pittsburgh, from the Old Judge series (N172) for Old Judge Cigarettes 1888

Curator: I’m immediately drawn to the theatrical pose—almost reclining! What a strange, performative choice for an athletic portrait. Editor: Indeed! Let's explore Goodwin & Company’s "Fred 'Sure Shot' Dunlap, Captain, Pittsburgh, from the Old Judge series." This albumen print, dating back to 1888, presents a baseball star in a very curious way, meant to promote Old Judge Cigarettes. Curator: Cigarettes, right! That completely re-frames how I'm looking at this. Suddenly, the theatricality reads as pure marketing—creating a lifestyle image of leisure and sophistication. The labor behind athleticism, conveniently, is absent here. Editor: Precisely. And consider the process. These weren't meant to be stand-alone artworks, but inserts included with the cigarettes. A mass-produced image, aimed at capturing and selling aspirational desires. I wonder about the photographer, their studio, and the sheer volume of these cards they produced. Curator: The visual cues are so specific: the pose, meant to embody confidence and power—almost heroic. And that almost obscured object clenched in his raised fist. What’s fascinating is how athletic prowess, as symbolized in Dunlap, then becomes a metonym for the brand itself: robust, reliable, desirable. Editor: The cigarette card format is revealing, too. The materials are incredibly thin. It really places it in a social setting, too, right? It’s a consumer object handled casually, reflecting everyday interactions of late 19th-century culture. To literally consume art along with the product...fascinating. Curator: These commercial images also played an important role in constructing ideals of masculinity. The relaxed posture combined with the stern facial expression speaks volumes. And there's that baseball cap off to the side. It represents both an access and an exclusion of an implied community surrounding that baseball field. It speaks to a broader concept of how image consumption contributed to building communal, but simultaneously exclusionary narratives around professional sports. Editor: Yes, and by embedding these cards within a commodity, they blurred lines between fandom, personal habit, and national identity in really insidious, almost invisible ways. These were literally consumed as ephemera, while imprinting these ideologies nonetheless. Curator: It shifts the artwork discussion from formal considerations toward this awareness about societal aspirations and the marketing techniques of the 1880s, making this a very specific record about culture and image-making, which moves away from our idealization of baseball heroes and the sports' industry as a whole. Editor: An ephemeral artifact loaded with lasting messages! Thank you.