Vendedora de Flores [Young woman carrying child on back selling flowers in a basket]

Antíoco Cruces and Luis Campa ran a prominent photography studio in Mexico City from 1862 to 1877. Along with commissioned portraits, they were well known for their "occupational types"--images of lower-class workers and street vendors. Through created with real working people who modeled their goods or trade for the camera, these photographs are not portraits. They look past individual identity to focus on the unique dress, exotic wares, or surroundings of the "type" represented. 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.