Wilmot, Washington, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes 1887

This card, promoting Old Judge Cigarettes, features baseball player Wilmot Washington, and was produced by Goodwin & Company. It’s an albumen print, a process popular in the late 19th century. Paper was coated with egg white and then silver nitrate, making it light-sensitive. The negative was then placed on the paper and exposed to sunlight. Consider the context: mass-produced photographs like this were distributed with consumer products. The images were relatively cheap to produce. They were made in multiples, not by a single artist but by factory workers in an industrial setting. The material quality—a thin piece of paper—reflects this reality. Its value lies in its combination of celebrity, marketing, and mass culture, rather than in artistic skill. The card gives us insight into how photography was becoming integrated into the machinery of commerce. It prompts us to reconsider the traditional hierarchy of art, craft, and marketing.