[Trade Catalogue for Producers' Marble and Vermont Marble Companies]

Unknown

1870s–80s · Albumen silver prints · Photographs

"When you are met with a flood of tears, the best thing to do is politely say that you will call again," advised one traveling salesman in the tombstone trade. For Cyrus Creigh, a thirty-something Virginian who sold stones from this annotated catalogue, such considerations were part of the job. In each new town, he might solicit names of bereaved families from undertakers and local cemetery staff. Slipped from a suit pocket and proffered door-to-door, his book of bluntly descriptive photographs sold surviving relatives a modicum of consolation. The stones, posed in a corporate studio and silhouetted in darkness, assume a solemn universality, as if any of their blank faces might soon bear a familiar name.

Artist

Unknown

Date

1870s–80s

Medium

Albumen silver prints

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Jefferson R. Burdick Bequest, 1972