Cedaceros (two young men selling molds)

Antíoco Cruces and Luis Campa ran a prominent photography studio in Mexico City from 1862 until 1877. Along with commissioned portraits, they were well known for their “occupational types”—images of lower-class workers and street vendors. Printed in the collectible carte-de-visite format, the occupationals reified social hierarchies for their elite and middle-class owners, just as they animated visualizations of Mexican identity and fostered nostalgia for a premodern way of life that was understood to be disappearing from the newly modernized urban milieu.