McCarthy, Center Field, St. Louis Browns, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes 1887

Curator: Looking at this evocative sepia-toned photograph, titled McCarthy, Center Field, St. Louis Browns, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes, a gelatin-silver print created around 1887 by Goodwin & Company, one can't help but admire the stark simplicity. Editor: Yes, stark is the word. It’s somehow melancholic. The texture of the backdrop looks almost like brushed muslin, yet the baseball player has an intensity. You can see how ubiquitous baseball cards would quickly become with marketing endeavors that capitalized on the cult of sports heroes. Curator: Precisely. We have McCarthy, a subject framed formally but made available to average people via an advertisement. And look at the tonal range achieved with gelatin silver printing here. A far cry from the sharp digital images of our age. Each print carries its own subtle imperfections, and a very tactile sense of the photographic processes and labor involved. Editor: It’s fascinating how such a seemingly straightforward portrait becomes a complex cultural document. Goodwin & Company harnessed the emerging popularity of baseball in a growing consumerist culture. Note how this is not just an image; it's intrinsically tied to the production and distribution of Old Judge Cigarettes, insinuating itself into leisure time. We see here the very early stages of advertising using athletes to endorse and promote products, even addictive ones like tobacco, in the popular consciousness. Curator: Exactly! Mass-produced items like this, tucked into cigarette packs, show us a critical moment in the industrialization of leisure and the shifting landscape of visual culture. This object’s humble origins—a small print meant to be collected and traded—belie the immense labor and material processes behind its making, from manufacturing cigarettes, assembling cards, baseball bats and clothes to studio portraits, etc. And Goodwin & Company certainly reaped a huge financial profit from baseball, further demonstrating that these material means become valuable far beyond what is evident here at first sight. Editor: Right, it's all connected. Gender is critical to note, too: who gets to participate in sport as recreation or business, and how the male sporting image intertwines so inextricably with marketing and capitalist aspirations of power at this moment in American history. A baseball player’s photograph as an inducement within cigarette packs touches on masculinity, consumerism, leisure, addiction, and cultural production at the fin-de-siècle. Curator: Looking closely reveals that even the mundane objects can tell very expansive, interwoven stories of capitalism. Editor: Yes, it provides us a peek into the cultural values that were forming around turn of the century industrial America, an insightful consideration of how marketing began capitalizing on entertainment and everyday realities.