IMAGINE HAVING LOST A LOVED one in the New England of the 1870s. Then, a knock at your door: a salesman in a suit. He pulls out a bound catalog of albumen-silver prints, with as many photographs in it as you’ve maybe seen in a lifetime, each showing a tombstone ready to memorialize your loss. The trade catalog for the Vermont Marble Companies offers a purchase for your grief, documentation that something exists in the here and now to honor those in the hereafter. This is an example of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research assistant Virginia McBride calls “the truth claim of photography,” a way companies used the supposed veracity of photographic images to convince customers they would deliver what they promised.
It’s an early highlight of a Met show on view this summer that McBride has curated, , which tracks how pictures made people familiar with objects for consumption and then, with the arrival of modernism, rendered such objects radiantly unfamiliar. The show, which features work from the nineteenth centuryphotography has been used to sell all manner of commodities. It’s a moment marked by a turn from the object for sale to the meaning of the sale itself.
