The goal of the “Coins of all Nations” Archival Provocation website is not to reproduce the “Coins of All Nations” cigarette card set; the NYPL has already provided high-resolution digital images and associated metadata on their website. Rather, the website provides an interactive experience of archives and a framework to access materials from NYPL’s digital collections using the “Coins of All Nations” as an entry point.
Blurring has been used as a visual strategy throughout the history of art to challenge traditional art techniques and question realities of seeing. In varying degrees, blurriness can be found in artworks from the Renaissance, Impressionism, Avant-Garde and every movement in between. When contemplating his own work, contemporary painter Gerhard Richter said “I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant” (Obrist 37). On the “Coins of all Nations” Archival Provocation website, the blur obscures, corrupts, and masks the racial implications of the caricatures, and gives the viewer the choice of whether or not they should be seen.
The use of this technique has two objectives: 1) to create a difficult viewing experience that requires some effort on the part of the viewer to reflect the challenging and troublesome nature of the racial and ethnic stereotypes illustrated in the caricatures. 2) to provide the viewer with the power to sharpen and make things clear. Because the act of hovering over the images to sharpen them is a different experience from viewing most images on the internet, the viewer will hopefully gain a new appreciation and take more time to look closely and contemplate the images. This creates a dynamic of knowledge production and begins the process of discovering new narratives through visual information.
Clicking on any card from the homepage leads to a detail page where the curation of publicly accessible archival material from the NYPL digital collection occurs. For example, the China detail page places the “Coins of all Nations, China” card at the center surrounded by visually related material. The methodology used in the finding and selection of material is as follows:
- From the NYPL Digital Collections website, a keyword search is performed for “China” with the option to search on public domain materials.
- Results are narrowed down by a date range of 1880 to 1920, the decades immediately preceding and following 1889, the year the “Coins of all Nations” cards were published.
- Material is selected based on the visual similarity with the “Coins of all Nations” card or material that adds context to the caricatures portrayed.
In the case of China, the cigarette card is surrounded by artifacts and images from colonial Shanghai, photographs by American photographers from souvenir albums, and artworks likely drawn by European and American artists. Interacting with and closely examining this curated collection may lead the viewer to question and contemplate new narratives about the history of China and the sources and contributing factors for the racial and ethnic stereotypes depicted on the specific “Coins of all Nations” cigarette card.
Additionally, a text description for the China cigarette card is provided which expresses what is seen in the caricature illustration without the use of harmful language and phrasing. For example, this caricature sports a type of moustache often associated with Dr. Fu Manchu, a fictional villain created by author Sax Rohmer and popularized in film in the 20th century. This is not included in the text description because it reinforces the racial stereotype.
Lastly, titles, relevant metadata, citation and links back to the original sources are provided to make a direct connection to the NYPL digital collections, allowing viewers to conduct further research. As a result, the “Coins of all Nations” Archival Provocation website offers an alternative experience to the NYPL digital collections website and makes accessible materials that are not often seen, especially in this context.
Duke’s Cigarettes, Coins of all Nations, 1889, An Archival Provocation was created and designed by Patricia Belen for Remote Archival Encounters, Prof. Duncan Faherty and Prof. Lisa Rhody, MA in Digital Humanities Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. All images are public domain from The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.