Card Number 227, Elain Caungfor, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-2) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Cross Cut Cigarettes 1880s

Curator: My eye is caught by the wistful melancholy hanging around her… there is such an unreal mood here. Editor: Let's dive into "Card Number 227, Elain Caungfor," a photographic print from the 1880s, part of the "Actors and Actresses" series by W. Duke, Sons & Co., designed as promotional inserts for Cross Cut Cigarettes. She is a type, in a sense. But of what? Curator: The 'femme fatale,' perhaps, re-imagined for a capitalist, commercial project? Her slight remove, the distant gaze, feels so utterly staged. She has been plonked down amongst artificial rocks and greenery, a siren on the rocks, only…she's selling cigarettes. Editor: Precisely! The symbolism is subtle but strong. The cigarette cards placed figures of entertainment within easy reach of consumers; like secular saints mediating earthly pleasures. Caungfor sits passively in the manipulated landscape, a commodity representing pleasure for other commodities. The cigarette is almost invisible here… it's lurking in the words above! Curator: Yet she still radiates a certain aura…that Victorian shadow. She is more than a marketing prop; the very idea of *her* depends on a confluence of meanings, of desire and representation. Is that why the setting feels less real, so much symbolic suggestion over documentary description? Editor: That is certainly key to her power! Consider her pose, perched above, like an unreachable goddess. Then you remember the function of the image— an advertisement, slipping easily into your pocket with a purchase of tobacco. In short, accessible pleasure! And this accessibility transforms something perhaps morally questionable into commonplace charm, perhaps. Curator: Perhaps the only question, then, is who *was* Elain Caungfor? Was she as unreachable, as otherworldly, in reality? What illusions did *she* harbour, I wonder? It is these kinds of ghost images I always chase when the layers of imposed representation are stripped away… Editor: That’s the magic of the artifact. That is exactly how figures and symbols gather multiple levels of reality and the traces of human stories over time, for generations who barely knew them… and can yet feel their haunting pull.